The remarkable bad faith involved in the 'what is a woman' attack

[Nevilledog]

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Philip Bump
@pbump
Read the line of questioning, consider the context, consider the central point. Or just hyperventilate with fury. Your pick.

washingtonpost.com
Analysis | The remarkable bad faith involved in the ‘what is a woman’ attack
The right is celebrating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's response to a loaded question, but the context makes clear that having such a celebration was largely the point.
8:16 PM · Mar 23, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/23/remarkable-bad-faith-involved-what-is-woman-attack/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/DEHdf

One of the realizations that emerges once you have children is that things we understand intuitively can be hard to articulate when asked. Emotions are classic examples, certainly, but even things like colors involve simply introducing more and more refined demonstrations of the category. As philosophers will tell us, language is necessarily imprecise but it's our only way of describing the world.

So I ask you, in that context: what is a woman?

You know intuitively, certainly. And, depending on how much time you want to spend on it, you can come up with a broadly bounded answer. But then uncertainty creeps in. When does womanhood begin? 13? 18? Is it dependent on the presence of body parts like a uterus? Does it derive from hormone levels? Chromosomal markers? There's something called Turner Syndrome in which people have only one X chromosome. Are such individuals women?

It seems a simple question and it can be answered simply, but it can also be complicated. “Red” is the absorption of a certain wavelength of light. It is also the color of hearts on Valentine's Day. What definition do you want?

Sometimes, answers depend very specifically on why the question is being asked. As in legal cases. And that’s why Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R-Tenn.) effort to pin down President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on her definition of “woman” at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday was such an obvious bad-faith ploy.

In the hours since Blackburn posed the question on Tuesday night, it's become a celebrated example on the political right of how beholden Jackson purportedly is to leftist subjectivism. Fox News both sent out a push alert about Jackson's response; the exchange was one of the only things about the hearing highlighted on the network's website on Wednesday morning. A phalanx of right-wing voices pointed to Jackson's response as disqualifying or a component of doom for any Democrats who might want to support her nomination.

*snip*

[RussBLib]

1. seems simple

an adult female

[betsuni]

2. I imagined women getting up and singing:

[maxsolomon]

3. The dangers of Progressive Education! Quelle horreur!

The actual danger is REGRESSIVE education. DON'T be who you are.

F Blackburn. Republics are the worst people in America.

[niyad]

4. WTAF????

[Solly Mack]

5. Republicans are the same people who think Trump is a "real" man

because of his cruelty and brutality. Because he huffs and puffs, sounding like a fart escaping a bloated corpse.

They are also the same people who think a woman's body has an emergency shutdown in the event of rape, that an ectopic pregnancy can be implanted elsewhere, and who wouldn't know the clitoris from the urinary meatus.

Yet they all think they're experts on the subject of who is and isn't a man or woman.

As well as female reproduction.

And epidemiology and virology.

And, from some of the questioning, don't know the differences between the job responsibilities of law enforcement and a trial judge. Nor the difference between the Constitution and the DOI.

The list of what they don't know yet always claim to be experts at is long.