Even Johns Hopkins University, home of one of the most prestigious medical schools in the nation, is having trouble deciding what a woman is.

The Baltimore university removed from its website its “LGBTQ Glossary” after being accused of erasing women over the glossary’s strained definition of the term “lesbian” as a “non-man attracted to non-men.”

On Wednesday, the university was backpedaling.

“The LGBTQ Glossary serves as an introduction to the range of identities and terms that are used within LGBTQ communities, and is not intended to serve as the definitive answers as to how all people understand or use these terms,” said the university in a statement on its website.

The university also said the glossary failed to go through the proper channels before being posted on the Office of Diversity and Inclusion page.

“While the glossary is a resource posted on the website of the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI); the definitions were not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership and the language in question has been removed pending review,” said the statement.

The university’s retreat came after blowback from gender-ideology critics like “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who noted that the definition of “gay man” included the word “man.”

“Man: no definition needed,” Ms. Rowling tweeted. “Non-man (formerly known as woman): a being definable only by reference to the male. An absence, a vacuum where there’s no man-ness.”

El Paso County [Colorado] Commissioner Stan VanderWerf tweeted: “John Hopkins! How can they be a research university if they cannot define what a woman is.”

Lesbian activist Arielle Scarcella asked: “Why is a lesbian a non-man but a gay person isn’t a non-woman? Progressive misogyny.”

Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of the Daily Wire, quipped: “Lesbians are now officially squirrels.”

Johns Hopkins isn’t alone. The TikTok account for the It Gets Better Project, a group aimed at supporting LGBTQ youth, posted a video in April that seeks to clear up the definition of “lesbian.”

“There’s a misconception that ‘lesbian’ means ‘a woman who loves other women,’ and actually, the definition is ‘non-men who are attracted to and love other non-men,’” says the unidentified speaker in the video, which was flagged by Human Events.

“It’s interesting to see nowadays that there are some folks who try to gate-keep that identity and only include folks who identify as women, and that’s not what being lesbian is all about,” she says.

The effort to redefine “woman” to include men who identify as women prompted several states to pass bills this year that cite biologically based definitions of “male” and “female” for purposes of state law.

The bills signed into law in Kansas, Tennessee and Montana were based on the Women’s Bill of Rights, model legislation created last year by the right-tilting Independent Women’s Voice and left-tilting Women’s Liberation Front.

• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.