HOW DID THIS......BECOME THIS?

THE SURPRISING EVOLUTION OF THE REPUBLICAN WOMAN.

- REBECCA TRAISTER

BARBARA BUSH, KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, ELIZABETH DOLE, KRISTI NOEM, NANCY MACE AND VALENTINA GOMEZ

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

Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn lobbed this query at Ketanji Brown Jackson during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Blackburn was doing her bit for her party’s effort to enforce transphobic gender conformity, positioning herself as a defender of womanhood as something fixed and narrow. When Jackson declined to provide Blackburn with a definition, noting that she was not a biologist, the senator took the opportunity to dial it up a notch. “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said with lip-smacking satisfaction.

Two years later, Republicans remain cruelly closed to the realities of gender fluidity and trans existence. But how the party understands—and represents— womanhood more broadly? Well … that’s getting weird. As we cruise toward November with two ancient white men on the presidential ticket and the rights of millions of people who are not white men in the balance, the public performance of Republican womanhood has become fractured, frenzied, and far less coherent than ever.

“A true conservative woman,” Valentina Gomez, one of several Republican candidates vying to be Missouri’s next secretary of state, told me in an email this spring, “speaks the truth, works hard, loves and knows how to use guns of multiple calibers, cares for the wellbeing of children and her family, doesn’t sleep with multiple men and most important, does not murder babies.”