Of course, this wasn’t a biology take a look at, it was a culture-war take a look at, and conservatives have been greater than keen to inform Jackson she had failed. “The meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn marveled, setting off waves of complaints about woke liberals and activist judges, and presenting Tucker Carlson with Christmas in March.
All that set the stage for this week, when a number of Republican lawmakers who had beforehand mocked Jackson’s reply set out to present how simply how easy and uncontroversial defining “woman” could possibly be.
“I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) knowledgeable the viewers at a GOP occasion after namechecking Jackson. “This is an easy answer. We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”
Meanwhile Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), already within the news cycle for implying that cocaine and orgies have been par for the course on Capitol Hill, determined to prolong his second within the solar by lecturing Nancy Pelosi from the House ground. “Science isn’t Burger King; you can’t just ‘have it your way,’” he mentioned. “Take notes, Madame Speaker. I’m about to define what a woman is for you,” he mentioned. “X chromosomes, no tallywhacker. It’s so simple.”
And this is the place I received the poor OED editor concerned, simply to be certain I understood precisely what Cawthorn was speaking about. She defined that “tallywhacker” is doubtless an Americanism, a variant of the phrase “tallywag,” which suggests “the testicles; the male genitals,” although Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a sea bass of the Atlantic Coast.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was requested by a HuffPost reporter to outline woman, and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” When the reporter requested him whether or not a woman whose uterus was eliminated by way of hysterectomy was nonetheless a woman, he appeared unsure: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”
So, to evaluation, right here’s the GOP tip sheet: If you need to know whether or not somebody is a woman, you need to merely stroll up to them and say, “Pardon, are you of Adam’s rib?” Alternatively, you may demand to see both a uterus or a “tallywhacker.”
These makes an attempt at defining womanhood will not be solely bizarre (“weaker sex” is retrograde even by the requirements of Republican gender politics), they are additionally unhelpful.
Let’s assume some staple items: that Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that every one people, not simply girls, are “creations of God”; and that Greene thought-about herself a woman lengthy earlier than she grew to become her “husband’s wife.” Presumably she is not suggesting that a woman who is single is the truth is a man.
Greene is recognized for her vigorous exercises and her sculpted biceps. Such a robust woman would definitely acknowledge that “weaker sex” typically will depend on the class in query (psychological, bodily, emotional) and on the person specimen. Does Greene imagine she is inherently weaker, on any of those dimensions, than, say, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)? How about President Biden?
That leaves us with the “Adam’s rib” bit, an allusion to the biblical origin story of ladies. Which, nice. But I’m undecided how a lot nearer this will get any of us to a definition of womanhood that we will really use in The Year of Our Lord 2022. How is a girls’s faculty or girls’s athletic crew supposed to incorporate the Adam’s rib take a look at into their eligibility insurance policies? Is there a swab for ancestral rib residue?
Again, this definition was the easiest that Greene might provide you with two full weeks after gloating on Twitter that Judge Jackson, “can’t define ‘woman’ so can’t say for sure whether her own two daughters are women.”
Cawthorn’s definition (XX chromosomes, tallywhacker-free) made me marvel what the congressman would make of former gymnastics champion Melissa Marlowe — or the opposite tens of millions of ladies with Turner syndrome, a genetic dysfunction outlined by a lacking X chromosome. I ponder how he would decide the gender of an intersex particular person who had reproductive traits of each sexes. Via a coin flip? A ruler?
As for Josh Hawley, I’ll say solely that I can’t wait to inform my mom that since her uterus was eliminated when she was 35 by way of a medically obligatory hysterectomy, she hasn’t been a woman in 26 years. Perhaps she might be consoled if I add that the senator appeared like he hadn’t actually thought very laborious about it: In the identical trade reported by HuffPost, he seemed to change his definition of woman to require not a uterus however a vagina: “I mean, a woman has a vagina, right?”
(Please word that by Hawley’s new definition he could be pressured to settle for trans girls, post-gender affirming surgical procedure, as girls too.)
I’m not making an attempt to choose at Greene, Cawthorn or Hawley for the enjoyable of it. They had advised that defining “woman” was easy, and I’m right here to say that it’s not. Not while you take the query significantly, and search for solutions outdoors your individual quick experiences and intuitions. Which is why when these lawmakers tried to present how a lot smarter they have been on gender science than a decide who takes issues significantly for a residing, what got here out was gobbledygook.
These lawmakers are recognized for incendiary rhetoric. (Case in level, Greene is now accusing everybody who votes to affirm Jackson of supporting pedophiles.) But I’m going to give them the good thing about doubt and say that I don’t really think Greene, Hawley and Cawthorn have been making an attempt to be intentionally inflammatory when providing their definitions. I think they have been making an attempt their finest and falling quick. I think they have been displaying that offering a definition for woman isn’t a job that may be decided by way of guidelines, regardless of how laborious the checklist maker tries to make it so.
I think what they have been expressing was not a data of biology, however moderately a concern of residing in a world they couldn’t simply categorize primarily based on what they already think they know. One wherein girls may not look or sound or behave precisely as they imagine girls ought to, and so the easiest way to outline “woman” is to ask the woman in query. Does she stay as a woman? Does she endure the trials and tribulations and joys of a woman? Does she imagine she is a woman?
“Provide a definition for the word ‘woman,’” Blackburn dared Biden’s Supreme Court nominee.
Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t do so. And neither might the individuals who mentioned it ought to be straightforward.