Those words, uttered by US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings in response to the question put to her by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, "What is a woman?", will be saved for posterity in the annals of postmodernism.
Most interesting about the lady's response is the fact that her status as a biologist isn't the issue. A biologist may well have given a similar answer because the question involves semantics, not biology. Semantics is a branch of linguistics that studies the meanings of words in a lexical, logical or cognitive sense.
In modern terms, a woman is a female adult human being. In the postmodern vernacular, where words have whatever meaning the speaker may desire, a "woman" may be almost anything or even nothing at all.
This may be a difficult thought to wrap one's mind around. It might be easier to look at it from the point of one of the items being investigated about Mrs. Brown's history, that being children. What is a child? Of course a child is an immature human. But it's also a "stage" in a human process, a stage that's not been precisely defined. When does a human become a child and when does childhood end? When does a child become a man or a woman? How is a man, for instance, defined, as opposed to a child? These questions all involve semantics, not biology.
In the not so distant past such questions were easily answered by the non-academics toiling in the fields or laboring in factories. In the postmodern age institutions like Harvard University are able to employ academics to produce speakers of postmodern language. For a price, Harvard can remold your offspring into speakers, and thinkers, with a command of the indefinite and illusion. They will be able to speak postmodern English with postmodern thinking.
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