On Tuesday Marsha Blackburn, the senior United States senator from Tennessee, asked Judge Jackson a simple question: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Jackson, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and sometime supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review answered: “Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” The judge, brow furrowed, seemed equal parts annoyed and genuinely confused.
Declan Leary, “I’m Not a Biologist,” The American Conservative, March 26, 2022, relating a moment in Judge Jackson’s interrogation by the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination to the Supreme Court.
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Ketanji Brown Jackson
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Judge Jackson implicitly conceeded that the definition of “woman” was biologic, rather than a matter of what a person selected for him- or herself. If I’m going to fault her answer, I would only say that she should have explicitly declared the issue to be biologic, except in legislation that overtly redefined the term “woman” for purpose of law.
Had I been asked, my answer would have been “an adult, biologically female member of the genus Homo, in our era presumably a member of the species Homo sapiens”.
Had I then, to clarify that definition, been asked what made a member biologically female, I would have felt a need to raise the issue of de la Chapelle Syndrome, a very rare condition of having two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, but having phenotypic characteristics associated with being male, sometimes with no ambiguities.
Did Jackson know anything about de la Chapelle Syndrome? I’d guess not; she wasn’t a biologist.