---
# System prepended metadata

title: What is a Woman?

---

# What is a Woman?

Collecting some of the 'key insights' from the bot's profile and tweet feed and replying in the text.

There are too many things as of now. Need to boil it down to bare substance. Also need to be fun. I didn't try to be fun, and it shows.

__Contents__
1. What is a woman -- according to this Twitter [bot](https://twitter.com/WhatIsAWomanBot).
    - Womanhood
        - comments
    - Gender
        - comments
3. Meme stuff

## What is a Woman?

> The definition is adult female person. This includes trans women because female can refer to gender. Watch this short video and continue reading the thread for my responses to common arguments. 1/5

The quote suggests that there is a problem with an acceptable interpretation of the definition (or concept) _is a woman_. It suggests that:
- several interpretations compete for the title of "best definition of woman"; and that
- any interpretation excluding trans people would be incorrect.

So for example, _homo sapiens sapiens with at least two XX chromosomes_ would not be an acceptable definition, because it excludes trans men trying to pass as women.

This assessment is misleading, however: it claims to have found in semantics an issue which is not there: the issue of whether trans people ought to be treated just like women (men) in policies, laws, and institutional rules, provided they are relevantly similar to other women (men) with respect to all situations under consideration.

What in fact determines the issue is whether there are situations where _not_ treating trans men/women as women/men would be wrong to women/men, or would be unfair to women/men. If such situations occur, society has a principled reason for keeping in store an interpretation of _woman_ that indeed does not extend to trans men.

So not only semantics is not the heart of the issue, but semantical issues are parasitic on issues of legal/political/moral consideration. Thus it's misleading to imply that the former determine the latter.

> #WhatIsAWoman is an ontological* question. It is often a lazy bad faith 'gotcha' by people who attack trans people because their existence challenges their beliefs about sex and gender. * related to the nature of 'being' 2/5

> A visual description of how the definition of women works when including the social concept of gender identity: https://twitter.com/WhatIsAWomanBot/status/1533928608338563072/photo/1

Still oblivious to the fact that the issue is not a matter of definition, but of legal, political and moral consideration, but Ok, we can put this aside.

In these [posts](https://twitter.com/WhatIsAWomanBot/status/1533928608338563072) the author claims that the concepts of _man_ and _woman_ do not admit of necessary and sufficient conditions, and therefore that the best way of defining _woman_ is to turn to self-ID ("you ask them if they are a man or woman").

It is true that a __scientific use__ of concepts like _man_ and _woman_ typically does not admit of necessary and sufficient conditions. (More precisely, the _reference_ of these concepts is typically _not_ determined by necessary and sufficient conditions.)

The reason is banal: what these concepts refer to is often determined in relation to concrete, particular samples on which science models -- by observation and reasoning -- abstract kinds and relations, which it uses as theoretical posits to act as placeholders for lawful or law-like relations (when everything else fails: statistical "laws"). 

The success of these theoretical posits depends only on whether they achieve simplicity, explanatory completeness, and predictive power. Science does not care if membership to a group of samples on which the same theoretical posit is observed or inferred, is expressible in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

It could be that, relative to some scientific domain, _homo sapiens sapiens with at least two XX chromosomes_ is less successful than _self-identifies with women_. Yet that would not entail that _self-identication with women_ should be substituted to the former concept. Perhaps there is a third-concept (that does not depend on biology, that does not entail self-ID, but on which self-ID depends) that underpins the theoretical success of _self-identification with women_ with respect to certain empirical questions.

> Some information on why thinking about social categories as fences with concrete boundaries is wrong. https://twitter.com/WhatIsAWomanBot/status/1533928610221858817/photo/1

> Biology is not being denied here. What's being challenged is "women are defined by their bodies/sex" which is biological essentialism. Is science anti-transgender? Here's what a doctor has to say. 3/5

Here the author is conflating two propositions:
1. that sex is not necessary and sufficient condition for defining womanhood/maleness;
2. that sex cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

(2) is correct; it amounts to the denial of biological essentialism. But (1) does not follow from (2): suff & nec conditions could fall short of fixing the reference of sex, but whatever does could still be nec & suff for fixing the reference of _woman_. 

Moreover, science does not support the idea that "gender" (whatever it means) plays any role in the demarcation between female homo sapiens sapiens and male homo sapiens sapiens. On the contrary, evolutionary biology makes no use of the concept of "gender" to demarcate between male and female individuals.

> The leading science affirms that trans people are real- they are who they say they are. Not a delusion or a mental illness. https://twitter.com/WhatIsAWomanBot/status/1485598789205323779 4/5

Science does not care about the "reality" of anything. What science -- at least empirical -- cares about is to come up with ways of carving up reality that facilitate the discovery of relations in and between kinds of things, in a way amenable to scientific theorization, as explained above. 

Even if science countenanced trans people as a new scientific kind  (new as in: "irreducible to any combination of characteristics of women or men, as scientific kinds"), it would still not follow that situations involving trans men/trans women always justify treating them as men/women, which is what the author is after.

## Gender

> Gender is the social and cultural division of people into categories such as male and female. Each category is an identity that has associated clothing, roles, stereotypes, etc.

> Typically, gender is associated with your assigned sex at birth- a baby with one set of genitals is said to be a boy, and another set, a girl. They are expected to fit into society as a man or a woman when they grow up. For the majority of people, this isn't an issue.

Here if _gender_ means _assigned sex_, this amounts to the claim that sex is not observable, but a mere matter of convention. Biology does not support this idea.

If _gender_ means _behavioral pattern that people try to fit in because of peer pressure_, it is irrelevant to trans issues -- it applies to almost all social species, from homo sapiens sapiens to fishes and lobsters. This is a little bit too generic to support the target conclusion about identical treatment of trans and non-trans people across situations.

> Some people do not feel like that gender (man or woman) suits them, and prefer to use a different label. This is not related to gender conformity or expectations, but rather an innate sense of who you are called "gender identity." It's part of who you are just like being gay is.

Same as the previous remark. You don't even need to have disphoria to be concerned by this. 

> Some people do not understand what it's like to have a gender that is different from what everyone expects you to have, or struggle to find a common experience to compare it to. This is why some people may think it's delusional or disordered, but it's very natural and normal.

Correct.

> One problem that transgender people face is the very pervasive idea that your gender must imply something about your body. Like "men produce sperm", for example. Biology is just one way of understanding one small part about people (their bodies) but can't tell you about gender.

It is true that transgenders feel like their body does not fit, that they as people do not fit in; that they feel enstranged, repelled by others, and discriminated against -- in different degrees and combinations. 

Beliefs about biology, however, are unlikely to play any role in this. Being disposed to repel or be hostile to trans people is unlikely to be tied to one's take on scientific theories. The opposite is usually true: first one hates on others, and then ones tries to rationalize it with theories.

> People are much more than just their bodies! The idea that biology is the only "true" way to understand people is incorrect. Many cultures and people from different time periods view gender differently. They understood people don't always fit into neat boxes, and that's okay.

> I mentioned before about gender roles and stereotypes. Stereotypes can be harmful! There is this idea that if gender is separate from biology, it must just be sexist. This is not true, and I explained why in this thread.

Even if people were just their bodies, it would be perfectly Ok for laws, policies and institutional rules, to treat trans men as women and trans women as men in __some__ situations (i.e. in matters of fundamental, individual rights). But as far as the argument about women is concerned, showing that trans men should be treated the same as women in __all__ situations requires more than the notion of gender; it requires an argument showing that there is no difference between trans men and women that justifies treating them differently in any situation.

As far as the current methods that trans men use to pass as women, the argument would need to show that there is a combination of surgery and pharmacology that either removes any such difference, or render it irrelevant to a differentiated treatment in matters of laws, policies and institutional rules.

## Serious stuff (see above)

## Fun stuff (memes)