Call the Experts

S enator Marsha Blackburn asked: Can you provide a definition for the word “woman”?

Ketanji Brown Jackson replied: I can’t. I’m not a biologist.

Those six words are a deathless expression of progressivism in 2022. What’s a woman? Sorry, I can’t help. Let’s call the experts.

Leave aside for a moment the half-guilty implication of the truth, that biology does in fact tell us something about womanhood. This is precisely what the trans movement, fueled by soft-science, has contested this whole time.

Instead, dwell on the exquisite irony of the moment. President Joe Biden had vowed to choose a woman of color to sit on the Supreme Court as soon as he faced the possibility of filling a vacancy on the bench. If womanhood cannot be known without the help of someone with an advanced degree in biology, preferably from a top-tier school, how did Jackson know she met the president’s criteria? Did Joe Biden ask any particular questions in the interview process to ferret out the truth of the matter? What sort of biologists would be consulted, anyway?

Jackson has filled out countless forms in her life — as a student, or employee, or a passport holder. When she filled out the part about her sex or gender as “female,” was she stating a truth that she knows with certainty, or was she merely guessing to an approximation? If she knows with certainty for herself, how does she know? What was the basis? Was it an unnameable sense that her subjective identity or her brain matched with her body?

Is this sense of mystery something we can expect if the future Justice Jackson faces a Title IX or other civil-rights trial? Will she seek out biologists to confirm the womanhood of the plaintiffs?

Justice Jackson is Harvard-educated and was well-prepped for her hearings. She gave a fluent, even mellifluous, exposition of judicial philosophies while being examined for hours at a time. And yet her answer demonstrates the strangest truth of our times: Every single educated progressive in the United States is bound by their sense of duty in the culture war to explain that sex isn’t a binary, when, of course, it is.

They are obliged to believe that an adult jurist on the highest court in the nation cannot provide a definition for the word “woman” without the assistance of a qualified biologist, but that a minor child can somehow know they are born into the wrong body, and that all the authorities and experts — psychologists, counselors, insurance companies, and parents — must yield to this perception and engage on a course of treatment that destroys the function of that child’s sex organs, permanently. They are obliged to believe that other forms of therapy that don’t condemn the child to a lifetime of futile surgical manipulation and maintenance — forms of therapy that simply wait it out, and preserve the health and function of the child’s organs — are themselves abusive and based in superstition.

It’s actually a remarkable phenomenon. The power of organized religions over Western civilization and its laws was torn down by a relentless intellectual bombardment, led by materialists, with biologists in the lead position. It was led by people who believed there were no such things as gods, or spirits, that there were no Platonic ideal forms in heaven — there was only matter; we could only reason from what we observed.

But the political demand of equality has totally unmanned materialism. In fact, the revolt was a long time coming. How could the ideal of equality really countenance a scientific enterprise whose foundation was “the survival of the fittest”? All self-conceptions are equally valid, or no self-conception is valid. That is how we get the mystery of the most qualified jurist being ignorant about womanhood, and the mystery of the child who intuits that they were born into the wrong body, the wrong material.

Ultimately this phenomenon is a kind of idolatry, an attempt to be as God is. Male and female as he created them was junked. And now the creature attempts to announce itself as “I AM” and compel belief.

The one thing Judge Jackson got right in her answer is that these mysteries require a priestly caste.