GOP Scrutinizes Biden Judicial Pick’s Writings on Gender, Race

President Joe Biden’s nominee to sit on San Jose’s US district court faced conservative scrutiny for her writings about how laws that regulate public conduct based on whether someone is a man or woman can be applied to intersex individuals.

Senate Judiciary Republicans on Thursday grilled Noël Wise, a California state court judge, on a Time magazine article that discussed how the legal system treats individuals who are born with or develop genitals, chromosomes, or reproductive organs that don’t match into a mutually-exclusive male-female sex binary.

GOP panel members admonished Wise for writing the 2017 piece and accused her of taking stances, while presiding as a sitting judge, on gender ideology. Republicans said that those stances hold implications for how she’d rule on issues related to transgender students’ access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.

“I think the idea that laws based on the distinction between male and female are a violation of Church and State is insane—totally insane,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said during the hearing. “I think the idea that laws that would say women’s locker rooms are protected from biological men—that those are impermissible—that’s insane.”

Wise defended that the article narrowly deals with intersex individuals and the difficulty that judges face in applying gender-based laws to “children who, at the moment of birth, doctors cannot properly assign as male or female.”

Wise also said that she believes “generally speaking for nearly all of us, the sex we are assigned at birth by the doctor is what we are.”

Senate Judiciary Republicans took issue with a number of writings Wise has penned while presiding on California’s state judiciary.

“We have a long list of your articles, and your opinions, and your political statements,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said.

Those include a piece she wrote for The Atlantic in which she criticized the racial, gender, and religious diversity of the Trump administration’s judicial appointees, while citing statistics that most were White men who “were raised or currently identify as Christian.”

In response to questions about the piece, she said that it was based on her belief in the importance of diversity on the bench. “I have never made any criticism against any particular nominee from any president. Collectively, I think it’s incredibly important that we have a diverse judiciary,” she said in response to Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI).