This Bitch Has Something to Say

"Can you provide a definition of the word woman?"

Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn from Kentucky recently asked Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to answer this question, not because she was looking for a personal answer - perhaps about the resilience and strength of women like Brown herself who rise in a patriarchal society despite its challenges - or because she suspects Jackson doesn't have a basic command of the English language, but because she was looking for a very specific answer about biology and chromosomes.

To start, we should all be able to recognize that the question itself is irrelevant in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing (much like most other Republican lines of questioning about religion and anti-racist babies), the purpose of which is to judge fitness for a life-long position on the bench. But more than that, it was a question not asked in good faith, one aiming to either A) catch Jackson in an answer that would somehow denigrate transwomen or B) get her to do exactly what she did - provide no answer - so that Republicans could froth over the mouth at it. Either way, what remained evident to me throughout those hearings is that what womanhood is most about is putting up with an exorbitant amount of bullshit. And sometimes, quite sadly, that bullshit is coming from your fellow women, whose internalized oppression endangers us all.

To be a woman is to wonder if your breasts make your shirt too tight for an interview, if you'll be able to walk home from the bar tonight alone, if you'll be heard at the doctor's office, if you'll be given the promotion even though you're pregnant, if your kids will resent you for the time you spent at work, if you're too quiet, too loud, too emotional, too aggressive, too ugly, too pretty, not enough. It is learning to exist and attempting to thrive in a world that was built for you to fail, because no matter what you do someone will notice you are trying to escape the confines of the cage built for you and they WILL have something to say about it. Your freedom makes men uncomfortable.

And yes, things are slowly changing. We can have conversations about gender as a construct, gender as performance, gender as fluid - all valid and complex assertions that deserve to be explored. But there is no erasing the experience of being a woman, which regardless of the anatomy you have, is irrevocably linked to the way you move through the world and are perceived. The treatment you receive (or are denied, if we are speaking of the reproductive health kind), the assumptions made (about your intellect, your desire, your capabilities), the tight rope you must walk that almost always requires a polite smile in the face of ignorance at best and outright sexism at worst.

Maybe to be a woman is to exist as the nexus of all these constraints and contradictions. And any moment of joy in the face of such a thing is both a triumph and act of resistance. Womanhood is war.