The Huffington Post asked Republican lawmakers the same question they say Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson failed to answer.
On Wednesday, the outlet released a report of responses Republican lawmakers gave to the question “what is a woman?”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told the Huffington Post, “I don’t have anything for you on that.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said, “I’m not going to indulge you.”
The outlet reported that Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) “dodged the question three times in a row, citing her policy of not talking to reporters in Senate hallways ― even though it was Blackburn who made this an issue with Jackson in the first place.”
A spokesperson for Blackburn told the Post in a follow-up email that a woman is “Two X chromosomes.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) responded the same way, saying, “A woman is born with two X-chromosomes.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) explained he has “more of a traditional view of what a woman is.”
When asked what that is, he replied, “My wife.”
According to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a woman is someone who is “biologically a woman.”
He added, “The birds and the bees stuff ― it’s been a while, but I think I remember the general gist of the differences. To have a hard time answering that question is kind of odd to me.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) offered a more descriptive response.
“Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman,” he said. “Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”
When asked if a woman is still a woman if she had her uterus removed, Hawley told the outlet, “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”
Additionally, the Post asked Hawley if a woman is still a woman if she loses her reproductive organs to cancer.
“I mean, a woman has a vagina, right?” Hawley asked.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said a woman is “an adult female human.”
Blackburn asked Jackson to provide a definition for the word woman last month, as IJR reported.
Jackson replied saying she cannot because she is “not a biologist.”
