Science says there's no simple answer to define 'woman.' USA Today

How do they define "science"?

Are they speaking for the whole of the scientific community in the world or for one 19 year old gender studies student with blue hair who identifies as "Science."?

USA Today is not neutral on this issue, it just made transwoman Rachel Levine its Woman of the Year..

Considering that people knew what one was long before science was studied, how long will it take for us to realise that scientists believe more in this religion than reality?

How many legs does a human have? Well I'm not a biologist! Scientists say it's not a simple question, etc, etc.

Ugh hate pointless arguments splitting hairs about words.

For as long as we’ve had human history, the man has been the one with the penis and the woman the one with the vulva. (And the occasional hermaphrodite is a hermaphrodite.) It isn’t complicated until some moron starts saying that woman doesn’t mean the one with the vulva but instead is the one with certain chromosomes or levels of testerone or dress sense or hair length or whatever 🤣

But if we just stick to the original definition it’s pretty simple stuff.

These ‘scientists’ are just scared for their careers / trying to please everyone while getting more research funding to study sex 🙄

Thank you for your contribution JustSpeculation.

I remember a module on conflicts some 12+ years ago. We were heading towards analysing ethnic cleansing and genocide and there was discussion on identity. The line pushed to us was that it can from two places that were sometimes contradictory: what you say you are and what others say you are. I wonder if it was running today whether one of those would be dropped.

I suspect the 'scientists' cited in USA Today have been very carefully screened and selected in the certain knowledge of which side of the debate they are going to come down on - the first 'scientist' referenced, Rebecca Jordan-Young, appears to have done her B.A. in Political science. Not sure how that qualifies her to make judgements about biology.. (Thanks Wikipedia).

People who claim that 'woman' is difficult to define, or unclear, or whatever, clearly consider males to be the default humans, and 'woman' to be some sort of puzzling variance from the norm.

Really good point! It always reminds me of soppy 1950s songs along the lines of "What is a woman? A beautiful dream, a fantasy ..." etc. The song-writers never thought womanhood would literally become a fantasy one day.

But more importantly, you never see TRAs puzzling over "What is a man?"
That's because (a) We all know a man is the standard human being, and (b) Transmen, being female, are not worth thinking about.

More BS.

21:25 JustSpeculation

The nationality analogy is a good and helpful one.
It points to the fact that identity is a function of agreement.

I couldn't just rock up into Italy and say "I identify as Italian", and get an Italian passport and have everyone refer to me as the Italian lady, despite the fact non of my relatives are Italian.

Other people, society, need to agree on a person's identity because it can't be dictated by the individual alone.

Why is gender identity suddenly so neurotically solipsistic?

A very drunk bloke on a Saturday night who has minimal educational qualifications can tell what a woman is.

Why can't these scientists?

I need to work out for myself what identity is and what it isn’t.

It seems to be that there is a difference between identifying as something and being recognised as something. I identify as being British and also as being English. I am also a Londoner, but I don’t identify as one. I was born and brought up in London, and can trace my London ancestry back to the 18th century, but I don’t feel any sense of being a Londoner more than anyone else living in London, irrespective of where they were born and brought up. This probably has a lot to do with spending so much time out of the country myself. And in some way everyone is a stranger in London. Everyone is just passing through. Your friends are not the local community, they are dotted throughout the city. At least in my case.

So I have a British passport and I identify as British. I don’t have an English passport. My Englishness is not recognised or documented in any way, so far as I can tell. But I still identify as English. The UK government, as well as the governments of all the countries I have visited and lived in, recognise me as a British Citizen. But it does not, to my knowledge, recognise me as being English. When it comes to being a Londoner, I have a 60+ oyster card, as TFL see me as a Londoner, and this gives me most gratefully received rights, but I still don’t really see myself as one.

There are people who identify as British, and have lived here almost all their lives, such as many of the Windrush immigrants, but who the government have (often controversially) decided not to recognise as British. I have met people who identify as being British but who have never lived here. They are descended from British immigrants to their country of birth. The UK does not recognise their nationality, and they do not seek this recognition. They know it, and that’s enough for them. There are also people who have British passports along with one from the country of their birth, but do not see themselves as British. To them it’s the residence document, in practice, which makes their family life here possible.

Clearly, there’s a great difference between identifying as British and being a British Citizen. Between identifying as British and having it recognised. Identity is a personal value, while recognition is an administrative category. And gender identity is a personal value, and we are not really arguing about this. The important aspect administratively is the recognition, the administrative category. That’s the thing that affects other people. For practical purposes, “woman” should be seen as an administrative category. It doesn’t define how people identify and what they see themselves as. It’s how an organised community deals with issues arising from observed sex differences.

To say While traditional notions of sex and gender suggest a simple binary – if you are born with a penis, you are male and identify as a man and if you are born with a vagina, you are female and identify as a woman – the reality, gender experts say, is more complex., as the article reports, is to suggest that we are claiming that identity is mechanically created from sex differences. But this is not the point being made. Identity is not binary, but sex most definitely is. If people want an administrative category based on identity, then they need to define it in more sophisticated terms than just “be kind”!

But I don’t think that’s possible.

I'm a scientist who spends quite a bit of time determining sex in humans - admittedly dead ones - and teaching students to do so - but that's harder and takes more time than doing it in living people which 99.9% of the time takes a second or two IME. Nobody in my University Department would find that difficult to grasp or pretend we can't do it.

I think there has only been two times in my whole fairly long life life where I truly couldn't tell in a living human - both adolescents/young adults and I still distinctly remember the weird feeling of bafflement about it quite clearly!

This has gone beyond ridiculous.

Scientists have no trouble identifying female gametes in all other species. Why would they be incompetent with our own?

Answer: they are not, and this is just nonsense.

You define a male as a person with a penis. A male is thence the other of the female and not a woman. It should be enough. People can live as they want. But females should be allowed spaces without males. If some people with penises don't like the male socialisation they encounter and it makes them unhappy, then that socialisation should change to accommodate all males, not just those for whom male socialisation works. But people born with penises are not females. Not women. The word is taken by females. People born without penises are not males. It is that simple because they problem is penises and their propensity to cause pregnancy in a female. Any other explanation is sophistry.

I wonder what Emma Hilton would say here.

Everyone knows exactly what a woman is. How fucking STUPID to think that we don't. Children KNOW.
The men who dress as women KNOW.
Rapists KNOW.

This bunch of clown scientists say they don't know?
Fuckwits.

When you spot that you realise how very much this whole endeavour is based on contempt towards bog-standard women and on the expectation that they hand over their hard-won seats at the table or be canceled.

Its time to start flipping this conversation and keep asking how do you define a male !

Stock's book does discuss the biological definition of woman in some detail, including the long list of definitions. If I recall correctly, many use the rule that if someone's biology satisfies a certain number of those, then that person is female. So not all definitions need to be satisfied for biology to conclude on this.

If you can't identify what a woman is, how can you identify as a woman?

Every single one of us came from a woman, when people say they don't know what a woman is what they really mean is I have no respect for my mother and I am happy to shit all over her and everything she did and went through for me to be the person that I am.

But they're happy to do that for the cookies, so I guess the cookie taste nice.

But it is of course true that the reality is more complex, not because biology has become more complex, but because identity is allowed to have a separate influence.

I wouldn't care about additional categories at all if the categories 'men' and 'women' were allowed to be about biological sex and if our language wasn't erased and our ability to mobilise impeded.

As things stand, I have no idea if I qualify as a woman under the new definitions. I base my gender on my biological sex, but not in the sense of some abstract identity.

As others have stated, the problem is not that science has several different ways of defining a biological woman or that sometimes (but not usually) they don't all give the same results.

The problem is that a person whose biology satisfies all definitions of what a biological man is can now be treated as a member of the oppressed sex-class, women, if that person's gender identity is accepted as THE definition.

Nobody knows what a woman is yet they are all so certain an adult male is one.

Funny that!