"What is a woman?" - eviltoast
  • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “Biological female” has always been a construct, not a social construct but a scientific one.

    Little known fact is that “gender” was adopted initially into parlance to try and rope off a certain arbitrary binary definition of sex before it was applied to social category. Biologically speaking “man” and “woman” was being shown to be way more vibes based than originally thought. An individuals chromosomes, hormonal balance, reproductive capability, outwardly visible genetalia and secondary sex characteristics were way more variable than a strict binary to the point where sex really was being looked at as more of spectrum. In a last ditch effort to preserve the idea of a sex binary the idea of a sort of model man and woman was derived as “gender” where everyone who didn’t fit neatly into those arbitrary boxes was looked at as essentially a deviation from the norm instead of basically just being normal in and of themselves. Basically 2 out of every hundred people are born with some sort of intersex trait and there are likely more since a lot of people learn they have some sort of intersex trait by accident. Like there are “biological” men out there who have uteruses or overies just floating amongst their other organs completely undiscovered until they get some kind of medical imaging done that realizes that it’s not just a benign tumour or a wonky bit of intestine.

    When people say the the definition is a wobbly gray area they fully include the biological component. Even if you are talking about cis people there is no all encompassing biological archetype which doesn’t exclude some cis women.