“What Is A Woman”
There are so many things whose definition naively seems so obvious to be hardly worth defining, yet once our understanding advances, that question turns out to be far more tricky.
What is “death”? The traditional answer, clinical death, is that death occurs when the circulatory system shuts down. But nowadays, we have methods that offer a chance to restore it, so the legal definition of death was changed to brain death, the point where thought and individuality are irretrievably lost. But that does not necessarily mean that the rest of the body is dead - fortunately, as this allows for organ donation - and even without life support, biological death, the death of the last cell, may well take a couple of days.
What is “life”? Many have trouble keeping in mind that this includes plants and fungi, not just mobile animals such as us, and indeed, the Bible did not consider even insects to be living beings due to their lack of breath. We discovered that there are life-forms that are far too small to see with the naked eye, yet highly complex nonetheless. Conventional definitions of life exclude viruses, but one can also argue that they are ultimately just an extreme form of obligate parasitism. And it gets even harder when it comes to abiogenesis and hypothetical extraterrestrial life - when does a system of catalytic cycles become a cell? Can there be such a thing as acellular life, or biochemistries fundamentally different than ours?
What is “an animal of a kind”? Every culture has its folk taxonomy, but those are arbitrary, with related languages and even dialects of the same language using different demarcations, and extremely superficial artificial groupings being all too ubiquituous. The “biological” species concept is not applicable to the many beings that reproduce asexually or parthenogentically, and even with sexually reproducing animals, its limits are clearly shown by ring-species - a reminder that evolution is still ongoing and will continue long after we are gone.
Is it then really such an absurdity that “man” and “woman” may actually be ever so slightly more complicated than sex at birth or karyotype?
