How? Women's history is about women. How can that be separated from their female bodies?How can art depicting women be separated from their female bodies. And how do you separate customs around childbirth from the fact that it is women with female bodies who give birth? I really struggle to see how anyone can separate being a woman from being female.
I would say it's not coherent to do it, because the body is what ties these things to the word woman. It creates it as a category that is meaningful.
But it is the case that they are physically separate things and a different order of thing, the history of women's literature for example is an artefact you could look at and read even if you were an alien who had never met a human being at all.
People who want to say the word woman isn't biologically constrained usually seem to want to say that being a woman somehow applies to those other phenomena rather than the biological element. I think it's this separate existence or distinction that allows them to think that way.
I don't think talking about an ewe is totally similar because an ewe is clearly just a female sheep. There is nothing more in the small mind of a sheep associated with that. There just isn't any example in the animal kingdom that we can see the same kind of cultural archetypes as you see in human beings. In any case so far no rams are claiming to be ewes.
I've met a few people who see gender as being about man/woman, and sex being about male/female. I would say that again they are drawing from a distinction between culture and biology - even if it doesn't bear close scrutiny, the fact is many people never take things to that level, and many seem to see enough of a distinction there to be able to justify the language change when it's suggested to them.
What I was saying was that while I can see that people do that, drawing from that peculiarity of human beings, no such distinction exists within the word female. In order to apply that to a male at all you have to really erase every element of the term. You have to be willing to say, gee, I wonder why these two cows aren't producing a calf, what could be wrong? This is something that is so immediate to almost everyone that it is difficult for me to see how someone like a judge could get it so wrong.