The United States of America has reached a “burn the boats” moment in its national history, the point when leaders make sure no one can sail back to the old country. Common sense and common good resided in our old country. We left it forever when the candidate for Supreme Court justice said during her confirmation hearing that she could not define the word woman.
I blame the question.
It should have been, Would you define the word female?
Growing up, I learned that male and female refer to sex (biological attributes) and masculine and feminine refer to gender (socially constructed identities). Infant, baby, child, adolescent, man and woman refer to stages of human growth. If the candidate had been asked to define a human female (one who possesses specific primary and secondary sexual organs of procreation and nourishment of the offspring) she might have had a clue since during adolescence her body matured to bring to reproductive capability the female organs with which she had been born: vagina, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries, uterus, mammary glands. If she had first defined female, she might have graduated to woman: an adult female.
Did she bring us nationally to the point of no return by saying she could not define the word woman?
In a way, yes, because before that moment, no one in her situation had made and affirmed such an admission as an apparently beneficial, appropriate, accurate answer. She can’t revise her folly–and the nation cannot unhear what she said nor retreat from what it knows about the minds of its leaders. She smashed the vessel of language we hold in common, saying, in effect, we are neither women nor men because no one, not even this high-placed jurist, knows what a woman or a man is. Perhaps the goal is to make us into “its” or “units.”
If Sojourner Truth asked the 2022 candidate for Supreme Court justice, “Ain’t I a woman?”, would she answer, “I can’t say”?