What is a woman

So…. what is a woman?

Or, indeed, what is a man?

For the government, a woman is ‘anyone who has a document (typically, birth certificate) that states they are a woman’. This comprises: natal cis women plus trans women who birth certificates have been amended. The latter is a direct consequence of obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

However, that does not give the full picture for two reasons:

1. The government qualify this by saying that people with an intention to get a GRC can in many situations be viewed as being in their new sex. This is because the process to obtain a GRC can often be lengthy and convoluted.
2. One may say ‘it is a legal fiction and laws should not define who we are. Because laws are subject to change and often not aligned with morality’.

Gender critical people define women as ‘adult human females’. This is equally problematic, for two reasons.

1. Defining women through biology reduces them to that biology. Women have been oppressed by millennia because of their reproductive capacity and external characteristics. They are still oppressed for it around the world. And so, why should this biology have a relevance outside the medical setting anymore? Sure, it is vital that a doctor knows what chromosomes you have, but why should this be relevant anywhere else? Progress means greater equality between the sexes than ever, and surely changing the very definition of sex represents an even more decisive break with the dark past?
2. Due to the existence of the intersex people, a hard and fast definition based on biology is not actually possible, because there will always be people impossible to classify.

This leads to the obvious question: what possible definition is left. If we supposedly cannot define women (and/or men) through law and if we should reject the archaic notion of defining women through biology, how can one produce a hard and fast definition?

This is a potential weakness that the so-called ‘gender criticals’ — people who wish to scale down the rights of transgender people — constantly target. Populist movements always appeal to simplistic narratives and their own primitive ‘common sense’ — conveniently ignoring the ‘common sense’ of everyone who disagrees with them, including the experts. They position themselves as ‘the voice of the people’ and everyone else as ‘the other’, people who are ‘abnormal’, activists who have left the path of reason. The question of ‘what is a woman’ is aimed to further that narrative — to show themselves as having a simple (and wrong) explanation whilst presenting the complicated explanation as out of touch with ‘the real people’ for whom they constantly claim to speak. There are many examples of this question being fired at politicians, who attempt to give a detailed answer and are then attacked for ‘not knowing what a woman is’.

In addition, gender criticals want to lie about the definition that transgender people do in fact use. They accuse transgender people of defining women via ‘regressive stereotypes’, through excessively feminine clothes, excessive make-up and adherence to traditional gender roles. Supposedly, trans people see women defined through these: to them womanhood is about painting their nails, wearing dresses, cleaning and cooking.

This is, of course, entirely false. Transgender women are as likely to be dressed in a jeans and t-shirt as any other woman. Some of them might expect to be doing more housework, but there is no evidence that this is a typical attitude among them. Gender dysphoria, the condition at the root of the trans identity (even though not all trans people in fact have it), is not connected to gender stereotypes: it is an innate feeling of being, not of doing. Trans women, in general, do not seek to be a particular kind of woman, they seek to be a woman.

So what is the definition? Well, sex is a social construct. It is a classification of society organically created in society by its members, based on, but not entirely in alignment with, biological sex. Legal sex is an attempt to capture, imperfectly, this social construct.

Under this social construct, a woman is whoever has a female gender identity. In other words, a woman is whoever says they are one. The equivalent definition, of course, holds for men. But hang on, what is this female gender identity, what is they are identifying with? This can be explained through group belonging: an individual observes men and women and feels a strong affinity with one of the groups. (Or they feel an affinity with neither, in which case they are non-binary). This does not mean adherence to stereotypes about what being a man or a woman entails: the affinity is felt to the entire group in all its diversity. It is no different to, say, feeling an affinity to your home town or country.

Gender criticals accuse this definition of being circular and unverifiable. The verifiability is quite easy to deal with: it is simply not required. Indeed, if someone claims a gender identity there is no test that would prove they are ‘correct’. We do not ask for such a proof in other scenarios however: for example would anyone be required to prove they are homosexual? You would not be expected to prove something of that sort, ever. Equally, no one would normally be asking a cis woman who might dress in an androgynous way to prove she is a cis woman.

The issues with circularity are trickier, and will require setting up a simple recursion equation. Indeed, on the surface it seems that one is saying, for instance:

• A woman is whoever feels an affinity to the group ‘women’
• The group ‘women’ is comprised of all women.

However, if one brings in the time parameter, this problem is fully resolved. Imagine there is a set of women at some past time t=0; let us call it W(0). This W(0) is created by asking everyone in a large population (say, the adult population of the world) whether they identify as a man or a woman, and writing down the names of all the women. It is entirely real and well-defined, being an actual list of actual living people.

We now need to define the conditions on which someone might join or leave W(0). At time t=1, we have a new set of women:

W(1)=W(0)-T(women to men,0)+T(men to women,0)

where ‘+’ and ‘-’ stand for set union and difference respectively and the T’s are the people who transition (in any way) between the two groups. How do the members of T(men to women,0) decide they want to be women? By observing W(0) in all its diversity and feeling an affinity with this group.

Now, we have a new group of women, W(1), at time t=1. It is exactly equal to the set of people identifying as women at time W(1). We now form the general ‘evolution equation’:

W(i+1)=W(i)-T(women to men,i)+T(men to women,i)

At each timestep i, the above process is repeated, and the time-dependent set W of ‘all women’ adjusts itself based on the people feeling an affinity with either W(i) or with the equivalent group of men M(i) and joining/leaving.

This recursively defines W, the current set of all women, in a non-circular way.

In practice, of course, the vast majority of women (and men) are cis, and remain cis for their entire lives. The number of people who ever transition, at any point in their lives (=the sum Σ(T(women to men,i)+T(men to women,i)) over all i), is very small in comparison (less than 1%). Therefore, the evolution described above is more of an ongoing, very slight, readjustment between two very large groups.

This also means that the vast majority of men and women a potential ‘switcher’ observes are cis. Far from it being ‘difficult to know what a woman is anymore’, the relative numbers mean that all the above definitions are actually very close together and the vast majority of people would be unquestionably either male or female under any definition one could reasonably propose.

To this, a ‘gender critical’ would respond that a definition that leaves womanhood just as a ‘list of current women’ is invalid, because it is lacking any criteria that describe it. That is purely a matter of opinion, however from a purely logical standpoint this is not a problem. Indeed, any such criteria being imposed on a highly diverse set of individuals will invariably be a simplification of the true picture, of the reality.