One of the most ridiculous features of our age of absurdity is that there is actually a controversy over what a woman is. But first Biden’s Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson refused back in 2022 to define what a woman is, offering the excuse that she was not a biologist, and now United States Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, whom Old Joe has nominated for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says she’s “unqualified” to offer such a definition. Then Sarah Netburn is likewise unqualified to serve on the District Court, right? Well, that would require a sane political discourse in our fractured and addled nation today.
The Daily Caller reported Tuesday that the latest absurdity unfolded when Netburn attempted to answer a series of written questions from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Knows What A Woman Is). Graham asked, “In your Report & Recommendation, you open your ‘Factual Background’ section by stating: ‘At birth, people are typically assigned a gender.’ … Is it possible to determine a person’s sex by only analyzing their chromosomes?” Netburn answered, “I have never studied biology and therefore I am unqualified to answer this question."
How long must this ridiculous charade go on? For thousands of years, human beings have readily discerned who was a man and who was a woman. They did this with a near-100% success rate even before the development of modern biology. The idea that it takes some years of study and specialized knowledge to determine who is a woman and who isn’t is as ludicrous as Netburn’s contention (which of course is not hers alone, but is quite common these days when social contagions vie with one another to see which one can be sillier) that “at birth, people are typically assigned a gender.”
Yeah, “assigned a gender,” like getting assigned math homework, or picked for the red team or the blue team for kickball at recess. And the idea is on that same grade-school level: the mind-control demons of the left are trying to plant the idea in our minds that some doctor arbitrarily decided we were male or female at birth, and we’ve been stuck with the decision, right or wrong, ever since. If the well-meaning doctor (who, after all, studied a lot of biology) was wrong, we can now correct his “assignment” with the hormones and surgery that will help us realize our true selves.
As I was writing this, a headline caught my eye about Tucupita Marcano, the major league baseball player who was just banned for life for betting on baseball. The story said that he placed his bets while “assigned to the Pittsburgh Pirates,” and that’s a reasonable enough usage. If Marcano had remained in the major leagues, he would likely have been assigned to other teams in the course of his career — indeed, he was previously “assigned” to the San Diego Padres and had returned to them after the 2023 season. It’s a simple matter of changing one’s place of work and uniform. But one’s sex, or gender as it is styled today, is not actually like that. It is part of one’s core identity down to the cellular level, and changing clothes or hairstyles, or even pumping oneself full of hormones and getting surgery, won’t change that.
The left, however, is at war with reality, and so Sarah Netburn has to pretend that gender is as changeable as discarding a Padres uniform and putting on a Pirates one. And we all have to go along with the emperor’s-new-clothes game of pretend, or else the full opprobrium of the left’s “anti-hate” watchdogs will fall upon us, and we’ll be stigmatized and deplatformed, and could face professional and personal ruin.
Related: Time for the Bud Light Treatment: NFL Denounces Player for Advocating Traditional Values
And so aside from all the enforced gender fantasies at play here, there is another question as well: can we please get a judicial nominee who has some courage? Some backbone? Must all the judges on the U.S. District Court be spineless time-servers who readily do the bidding of their ideological masters and deny obvious reality in pursuit of professional preferment?
Sarah Netburn knows perfectly well what a woman is. So do the senators who are going to vote to confirm her. She deserves to be disqualified for this answer to Graham alone, not just because the answer is obvious, but because if she lacks the courage to state the obvious, how is she going to take stands for justice when they’re unpopular and require the same virtue?
