What is a Woman?

Hi. I’m Lone Candle, and I’m here to tell you what the Hell a woman is.

Asking people what a woman is has become a gotcha game. The question tends to be asked to women’s or trans’ rights activists or politicians, and then when someone doesn’t have an immediately clear answer, boom, they look like a fool! The real fools, are those looking down on someone for not having a quick and good answer.

Defining a woman isn’t as clear as it might seem. For one, there are two different concepts that we’re referring to. Second, one of those two concepts is not an easily definable thing.

When we talk of a woman, we may be referring to sex or gender.

Even defining a woman by sex isn’t as straight forward as it may seem because some people are born with missing or ambiguous parts. About a dozen different conditions can make one’s sex confusing, and their occurrence isn’t that rare. Some women don’t have their second X chromosome due to Turner syndrome. Some people with an X and a Y chromosome, which by chromosome would make them a man, physically look like women due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Some people have ambiguous genitalia. Doctors sometimes can’t tell for sure what a baby’s sex is. Still…generally, if you’re born with a vagina, a womb, or/and two X chromosomes, you’re a woman by sex.

However, when we think of the differences between women and men, we are at least as much thinking of things separate from body parts and chromosomes. We’re thinking of: how a person walks, how they…