Morley wrote: ↑Thu May 05, 2022 2:36 pmWhat's a woman?
I'm reminded of the perennial question: "What is art?" Though difficult to define, the short answer is that art is that which society recognizes as art. Needless to say, the designation is entirely contextual.
Approaching it that way, a woman is that which society recognizes as woman. Which is why there's such a tempest over the definition. Like the term marriage, some folks want in, some folks want out, while others want to build barriers around the term.
Ha! The terms female and woman are not the same thing. Woman isn't a term used in biology. As the category art is subjective, so is the category of who is a woman. Woman is a word we use to label those whom we wish to place into a category.
"Our daughter is now a woman," is not a statement of biology. It's assigning a person a categorical designation. We may decide that our daughter became a woman when she began menses, got her first job, or when she got married. None of these is a biological designation. First menstruation doesn't doesn't signal biological maturity, neither does learning to cook nor getting laid. We use the term woman to signal that we've subjectively placed a person into cultural category.
Transitioning people would like to be placed into that category; folks who consider themselves nonbinary want to be excluded from that category--not on the basis of biology, but on that of culture.