“Define a woman”…

This is another basically political post, but it’s at least science-adjacent. And this is my blog, so I get to be a little political if I want.

Certain flavors of right-wing “gotcha” journalists, and occasional others, delight in confronting politicians and various experts with the challenge to “define what a woman is”. (click these links at your own risk, I didn’t watch any of them, I didn’t want to give most of them the views)

But the thing is, defining things is hard. I mean, defining things in the general “So, roughly what is that” sense can be fairly easy, but actually defining things such that you include anything close to all of the things, and only the things, that you’re trying to define, is hard.

Let me illustrate, with an imaginary conversation.

“Define a chair.”

“Well, it’s a thing you sit on.”

“So, if I sit on a rock, does that make it a chair?”

“No. It’s a piece of furniture that you sit on.”

“So, if I sit on my bed, does that make it a chair?”

“No. It’s a piece of furniture that’s just for sitting on.”

“So, if I put a stack of books on this chair, does it cease to be a chair?”

“No. Um, it’s a piece of furniture designed primarily for sitting on.”

“So, is my sofa a chair?”

“Not really. It’s a piece of furniture designed primarily for a single person to sit on it.”

“Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. Now we need to define furniture…”

Consider how difficult that was. And people are more complicated than chairs, ^{(citation needed)} so even leaving aside the question of gender vs sex (I will do an article eventually on the various ways that even *sex* isn’t always a neat, tidy “You are XX with girl parts or XY with boy parts” binary for humans, and edit this aside with a relevant link at that time) it makes sense that it’s hard to define “woman” in a way that includes 1. all women, and 2. only women.