Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated by Joe Biden to be a US Supreme Court Justice, in Washington, D.C., USA, 2021 of April 2021: “I am not biologist”| Photo: EFE/EPA/Tom Williams
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Joe Biden to the US Supreme Court on the day 25 of February, is being discussed in the country’s Senate before a possible confirmation. Praised by progressives as a competent academic and a brilliant career judge, she faces skepticism from Republicans, many of whom think she was nominated primarily for being a black woman and scoring identity points.
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson asked her to reveal her academic grades to prove that identity factors did not tell more than their history of competence.
The Senator Ted Cruz thinks she was too lenient with pedophile cases, for example convicting a pedophile of 03 years who had possession of child pornography to only three months in detention, below the recommended by the prosecution and the law. The judge would have been lenient in seven such cases. She justifies herself by saying that, with the advent of the internet, acquiring thousands of images of this nature has become easier and the volume of effort is not the same as before, not justifying a penalty of “03,
or 768 years in jail”.
“I cannot define what a woman is”
What drew more attention, however, was the way in which the magistrate responded to Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who asked for a hearing last Wednesday ( )) that she would define the word “woman”. “I can’t,” Jackson said. “Not in this context, I’m not a biologist.”
Senator Cruz pressed her on the issue: “As a judge, how would you determine if an applicant a gender-based norm, regulation or policy without being able to determine what a woman is?” Jackson responded that “I know I’m a woman, I know Senator Blackburn is a woman, and the woman I most admire in the world is here today, my mother.”
Cruz was not satisfied: “According to modern leftist sensibilities, if I decide now that I am a woman, so apparently I’m a woman. Does that mean I would be entitled to [acionar] a gender-based restriction?” Jackson replied that “this type of matter is being processed by the courts and I am not able to comment on it”.
The judge’s performative ignorance of what a woman is is reminiscent of what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, in the UK. In September 2021, LBC London broadcaster Nick Ferrari asked MP Rachel Reeves “if it is transphobic to say that only women have a uterus”, in reference to the statement by another Labor Party MP, the same as Reeves, who had to stay out of the party conference for making this statement. Visibly disconcerted and stuttering, Reeves twice tried to change the subject, finally replying that “if someone identifies as female or male, they should be entitled to do so no matter what their body parts are.”
Adult human female
The political theater around the definition of the word “woman” reflects the conflict of the rise of the identitarianism, which seeks to change the meaning of fundamental words like this for its purposes of moral inequality between human groups, and common sense wisdom, if not scientific knowledge. “What is a woman” should be answered as “adult human female” as this is the case for the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves women. If we were to give up definitions that cover the vast majority of cases and leave out exceptions, we would have no science and barely have language.
While Judge Jackson reveals herself to be committed to the new dogmas of identity by refusing to answer this question as it would have been answered in saner times, it is interesting that, almost in a careless moment, she assigns the task of defining what a woman is to biology. This goes against the radicalism of the identitarians themselves, who are biophobes and intend to close the question of gender and sex by claiming that one or both are “social construction” (an ambiguous term behind which they hide a hope of establishing sociocultural determinism above biological biology). ). While the complete task should not be left in the hands of biologists, they do have a lot of relevant things to say about it.
