Senators astounded after Judge Jackson refuses to define 'woman,' saying she's 'not a biologist"

Republican lawmakers were taken aback earlier this week after Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson – the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court – refused to define the word “woman” citing the fact that she is not a biologist.

According to a New York Post report, when Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked the DC Circuit Court of Appeals if she could define the word “woman,” Jackson responded saying, “No, I can’t.”

“You can’t?” Blackburn asked.

“Not in this context. I’m not a biologist,” Jackson said, causing an uproar amongst conservatives across the country.

Senators confused after Judge Jackson refuses to define 'woman,' saying she's 'not a biologist' pic.twitter.com/w6RjXs3Lh6

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Shortly after the exchange occurred, New York Post columnist Piers Morgan took to Twitter to qualify the response as “ridiculous.”

“I’m not a brain surgeon but I know what a brain is. This is where ‘progressive’ thinking leads – to a terror of stating basic unarguable facts lest it offend the woke brigade,” he wrote on Twitter. 

Similarly, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote, “This shouldn’t have to be said, but if you don’t know what a women is, you shouldn’t be in any position of responsibility — let alone decide the fate of the Republic from our nation’s highest court.”

Dan McLaughlin at the National Review also attacked Jackson’s response from a legal perspective, tweeting, “The 19th Amendment lists ‘sex’ as a prohibited basis for discrimination against voting rights, & abortion advocates sometimes argue that the propensity of women to get pregnant means that gender equity requires a right to abortion, so defining what a woman is? Not irrelevant.”

Although Jackson claimed to be unable to define the word “woman,” she indeed used the term several times while addressing the Senate on Tuesday – even insisting that the Supreme Court’s decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey “are the settled law … concerning the right to terminate a woman’s pregnancy.”

Later on while answering a question from Sen. Ted Cruz, Jackson attempted to backtrack on her perceived misstep.

“Yesterday, under questioning from Senator Blackburn, you told her that you cannot define what a woman is … I think you are the only Supreme Court nominee in history who has been unable to answer the question, ‘What is a woman,'” Cruz said. “How would you determine if a plaintiff had Article III standing to challenge a gender-based rule, regulation, policy without being able to determine what a woman was?”

“Senator,” Jackson responded. “I know I am a woman, I know Senator Blackburn is a woman, and the woman I admire most in the world is in the room today, my mother.”

In an interview with Just the News, attorney and longtime Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz said that he interacted with Jackson when she led protests against offensive flags in 1991 as part of Harvard's Black Students Association.

"I hope that she's changed her views on that in the last 31 years and understands that some of the greatest threats to freedom of speech come from claims of equality on the other side or inequality on the other side," he said. "I hope she will understand that you can't have equality without having complete freedom of speech in the First Amendment."