The first black female Supreme Court justice has embraced the gender ideology that is alienating ordinary Americans, by Gerard Baker for The Times.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is black. And a woman. She made history last week by becoming the first human of said race and sex to serve on the US Supreme Court. At her confirmation hearings in the Senate, the public was repeatedly reminded of the significance of that fact, by Jackson herself, nominated last month by President Joe Biden to fill the seat vacated by the retirement of Stephen Breyer, and by Democratic senators, who hailed the nomination as a milestone in the story of America’s progress towards equality.
Opening the hearings on Tuesday, Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put Jackson’s unique status into perspective. “In its more than 230 years, the court has had 115 justices; 108 have been white men. Just two justices have been men of colour.
“Only five women have served on the court — and just one woman of colour. Not a single justice has been a black woman. You, Judge Jackson, can be the first.”
Jackson herself, understandably eager to emphasise mostly her manifest intellectual and professional qualifications — Harvard undergraduate, Harvard law, Supreme Court clerkship, federal district judge, federal appellate judge — to serve on the nation’s highest court, nonetheless nodded repeatedly towards the symbolism of the moment.
“I am humbled and honoured to have the opportunity to serve in this capacity and to be the first and only black woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” she said.
You can, if you’re like me, recoil at the endless insistence on the idea that someone’s gender and race should be the subject of so much focus in assessing their credentials. But — and whatever we might think of her jurisprudence (Jackson is a reliably progressive jurist who seems likely to find herself on the far left flank of the court) — it’s still also possible to celebrate the symbolic importance for the nation’s historically underrepresented minorities of having one of their own installed at the very pinnacle of the American establishment.
So it was jarring to hear Jackson’s answer to one question from a Republican that was by far the most memorable moment. Discussing a case about gender-based admissions rules at a college, Marsha Blackburn, a senator from Tennessee and, evidently, a white person who is also a woman, asked: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
“I can’t,” said Jackson. “Not in this context. I am not a biologist.”
Here we were, the Senate, America itself, all invited to marvel at the elevation to the republican pantheon of an African-American adult female, and suddenly, we were now being told that at least half of that identity couldn’t actually even be defined. It was a deflating moment.
Black. And a “woman” (pending biological classification).
Saying you need to be a biologist in order to define “woman” is like saying you need to be a botanist to define the word “flower” and it was, for such an evidently intelligent, and amply qualified person as Jackson, an absurd answer.
But it was also, in our depressing age of enforced verbal-ideological conformity, a necessary absurdity.
Jackson is too smart a — yes, woman — to be so easily caught out by answering the question in a way that might have raised bright red flags with the progressive thought police.
Her careful evasion was a sign of how entrenched the left’s orthodoxies are among the Democratic Party and its allies.
But the nonsensical spectacle of a woman celebrating her appointment as a triumph for her sex while simultaneously obfuscating on the very nature of sex was a reminder of how out of touch, and indeed mad, the enforcement of this ideological conformity has become.
The attempt to rewrite language and re-do science to the point where sex becomes a vapid legal construct was underlined this week with the case of Lia Thomas, the transgender college swimmer.
Thomas, who was born male but changed gender after three years of performing as a male at the University of Pennsylvania, last week won the college national swimming championship in the women’s 400m event.
In a dramatic and poignant ceremony in Atlanta, almost total silence greeted Thomas as she was awarded the first-place trophy, followed by wild applause for second-placed Emma Weyant, a student from Florida who attends the University of Virginia.
Thomas went through puberty as a male and has therefore most of the muscular, respiratory, cardio-pulmonary and other advantages associated with males — even as she now competes against other women. It’s not transphobic, as Caitlin Jenner, herself a transitioned woman and former athlete, pointed out, nor cruel to Thomas to regard this as unfair and destructive of the very idea of distinctive opportunities for females.
The big problem for Democrats is not just the unreason or unfairness of their ideology. It is politics. Across the country, voters are reacting with revulsion to these attempts to redefine science, language, and opportunity. This week Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and a leading contender for the Republican nomination in 2024, seized on the Thomas controversy, issuing a proclamation declaring Weyant, his state’s resident, the “rightful winner”.
Soon enough Justice Jackson will take her historic place on the court, and she will surely be faced with cases that ask her more legal questions about the nature of sex and gender. It will be no surprise if she quickly demonstrates an impressive — and dispositive — understanding of the meaning of the words.