this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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From a biological perspective, this question has been answered already as it's really not that hard.
Many people apparently just don't like the answer.
Actually more complicated than that. Sex is broken up into a bunch of factors. Phenotype is the word used to mean the grouping of characteristics we associate with either male or female. So that roughly covers genitals, secondary characteristics (boobs, body hair, build differences etc)... But it's actually wild.
Chromasomal sex - On it's own means very little. If you have say an XY chromasome but for the sake of example an androgen insensitivity you develop as (phenotypically) female in the womb.
Horomonal Sex - Is the mix of horomones that impact development. Whether you develop to appear male or female starts in the early stages of development in rhe womb and then kicks into high gear as puberty and can change unexpectedly. This means for example that there's people who were born appearing entirely female and yet naturally develop along male lines later and vice versa.
Internal reproductive Anatomy - This one gets crazy where individuals don't always have internal organs that match their chromosomes. You can have opposite, none, both.
The precursor of trans medicine involved a lot of case studies seeing how naturally occuring variation in biological sex worked and the more it was studied the more scientists began to panic because they realized that the model of sorting into two strict sexes was flawed. There's a lot of people out there who live practically their entire lives only to realize at the doctor's office that they have surprise characteristics quietly existing hidden just below the skin. This lead to scientists realizing that for the most part the idea of phenotype and indeed a strict definition for biological sex is actually pretty wishy-washy.
The reason you weren't taught this in high school is more or less that they just don't prioritize it because they have to coach a group of students, many of whom are not scholarly material, through an overview of stuff. High school biology is basically all technically wrong because it's been simplified to give you a taste of the discipline. If you start going to med school the first thing they do is tell you to light everything you think you know about the body on fire, throw it in the trash and start from scratch because half the stuff you were taught is going to need be unlearned. "Chromosome = sex" is one of the things that goes in the burn bin.
Ther is literally no definition you give that will not exclude any cis women at all.
I don't even think they have a definition. The closest they've gotten to one in this thread was "males take care of food, protection and territory defense (if applicable) while females give birth and primarily take care of children," but then later in that same comment they said that there are exceptions. It's an even worse definition than the adult human female thing, because that at least tries to make a box that every woman fits in
I think the overarching definition needs to go a bit abstract and fuzzy. Like, a woman is a role that society defines and associates with certain acts, activities,. expectations and looks, blah blah blah. This is the approach some medicine takes when defining drug abuse. What's drug abuse? According to a nursing textbook it's what society defines it to be.
Yep, it's a very complicated topic because gender roles and expectations change depending on time and place. What "society" considers a "woman" differs from place to place and person to person. Even the very prominent "adult female human" definition isn't sufficient, because all three of those words are arguable to certain degrees.
Personally, I think the best definition is "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman." It perfectly includes every single person who I consider a woman, and excludes every single person who I don't consider a woman, and it doesn't disagree with anyone's interpretation of their own identity.
Buying groceries makes you a male, and taking the kids to school makes you a female, clearly.
Lmao
Why do I get the feeling the "answer" you're talking about is just chromosomes
This is such an insane statement. In biology almost any kind of sexual behavior has been observed including male species who carry the young in their body (sea horses), species that are both male and female, species that change gender during a lifetime, species without gender etc etc. Literally anything goes in the biological world.
While true, there are some established standards. And amongst mammals, the standard is always that males take care of food, protection and territory defense (if applicable) while females give birth and primarily take care of children. Are there exceptions? Absolutely. But for most of the existence of the human species, it was just like that - males were taking care of food and protection, while females were doing the "safer" jobs, like childcare of gathering.
Yes, biology is complex, but the case of humans is rather clear-cut. The only reason why we argue about this is because we have evolved to a point where we're no longer that reliant on biology - that does not change the fundamentals tho.
Wrong
Exceptions imply that these roles are not strictly inherent to animal (including human) behavior. If colonizing countries weren't all patriarchal, I'm sure we would've seen many more exceptions.
These exceptions exist for a reason, whether or not they fit your personal worldview.
This is just a bad argument, and has been used to justify all kinds of awful things. why would the fact that humans have always done things a certain way imply that that's a good thing? Is slavery a good thing? rape? colonization? genocide?
Rigid gender roles have only truly served half of the human population. Even so, men have also suffered in other ways because of them. Why shouldn't we work to better everyone's lives, in as many ways as we can manage?
This is demonstrably false. Biologists have known as much for... quite a while. Please consider informing yourself before making claims about important topics.
Yes, these do exist - but that still doesn't mean it's a counterpoint to the fact that the "status quo", if you will, is what I described earlier.
Okay, but that doesn't mean the argument doesn't hold in this particular case.
Nobody talks about it being good. I have made zero judgement about if that is a good or bad thing - it's just a thing. But I feel that the "old times", where humans were much much less self-conscious and organized, is a solid indicator to how we would act if we were more living off of instinct instead of societal pressure.
I don't think you understood my comment. I'm not saying that gender roles are a good thing. What I AM saying is that it is, from a biological standpoint, very easy to determine who is a woman and who is not. I'm not saying that every woman should do "womanly" things and every man should do "manly" things.
No, it's really not, but I do agree that finding factual information regarding this topic is nearly impossible these days as it's a topic completely enveloped by political bias and everyone tries to bend the facts as much into his desired direction as possible. However, from my viewpoint and some discussions I had with people who are very well versed in that topic, the human is a rather traditional mammal that also behaves like one - including that only women are able to give birth to children.
You are just making this up as you go along. I can disprove your theory by the animal living in my house: cats live solitary lives and therefore do not divide tasks between genders. The idea that females primarily take care of children makes no sense since in most species (incl. most mammals) kids grow up pretty quickly. In most animals there is no sharp distinction of tasks between males and females.
??? No they're not? Cats do raise their young what the fuck. The female is also the only one that can ensure the kitten survive as she's the one producing the milk which is necessary. Male cats usually don't give a fuck about the kitten and just bring food for the mother.
The only exceptions to this is lions (which is sorta a cat), where females do everything and the males are just lying around.
Very cool you think so. Yet it's the case. I don't know how I can prove something that obvious to you. Just pick any common mammal you might find outside and there's a 95% chance that the female animal will take care of the child.
You seem to misunderstand me (deliberately??). Obviously female cats carry and nurse the young, but they also hunt, protect their territory etc (I.e. all the tasks you ascribed to males in your previous posts), because they live solitary.
Then the standard isn't always X lmfao
Are you trying to seem more stupid than you are right now? Is a human with two arms not the standard because there are a small amount of people with more or less? Is a cat with a tail no longer the standard because there are cats without tails?
A standard is a standard if the majority of cases fit it. If 95% of all humans had brown hair, that would be the standard. Period.
Stop coming up with these dumbass arguments.
You didn't say it was the standard, you said it was always the standard. If there are exceptions, then it isn't always the case.
That's female, not woman, but it was a nice try
I know you probably don't want to hear this, but from a biological standpoint, it's the same thing. Different female animals have their "own" names aswell, like Ewe (female sheep), Sow (female Pigs), Hen (female Chicken), Doe (female goat), Mare (female horse) etc. Same thing for humans - we just happen to call the female ones "Woman".
That's not a "biological standpoint" it's a social one. We invented the names for animals. And there's more than one word for female horse because it was useful for us to differentiate foal/yearling/filly/mare, and males get an extra one if they're castrated.
Speaking of inventing names for things: biological sex is not the same concept as gender even though they are very often aligned and used interchangeably. It's just people who don't know enough about anthropology and biology lack the full context to understand that.
Those are different things tho, mostly seperated by age.
Foals are baby horses (roughly equal to "baby"), yearling are young horses (roughly equal to "kid"), fillys are young female horses (roughly equal to "girl") and mares are adult female horses (roughly equal to "woman").
That's why I specifically said "from a biological standpoint". I'm well aware that some people may choose the opposite gender so it differs from the biological sex.
From a biological standpoint, there is no such thing as a woman, just like there is no such thing as a fish or a vegetable from a biological standpoint.
"From a biological standpoint" you're still wrong because the real world isn't simple. There's more chromosome options than XX/XY. There's various disorders that can cause people to develop in ways contrary to their sex chromosomes. There's chimeras, intersex, people born missing parts of their body.
"Biological sex" is a convenient simplification like "there are three phases of matter" or the concept of tidy electron orbitals.
Exactly. And that's what they are. Disorders. That doesn't mean it breaks the status quo. If 100 people are born with two arms and one person is born with three, we don't go around saying "humans can be born with 2 or 3 arms!". No, we still say that humans are born with two arms.
Trying to extend definitions to include every possible whim of nature is completely futile.
What? Yes we do. Only about one out of every hundred people is born with red hair, and we definitely say that humans can be born with red hair. If one out of every hundred people was born with three arms, we would absolutely say that some humans are born with three arms. We certainly couldn't use having two arms in our definition of human
Which is significantly more than people having a third arm.
Yes, but they're not. That's the entire point.
I get the sense that you don't have nearly as firm a grasp on language and communication as you think you do. You explicitly made reference to a hypothetical situation in which 100 people are born with two arms and 1 person is born with three, and then made a statement about how we would act in that hypothetical situation. If your entire point was that a shockingly small fraction of the population is born with three arms, you should not have used a nearly 1% proportion in your hypothetical.
But also, the proportion of the population doesn't even matter. If some humans are born with three arms, then you have to acknowledge that humans can be born with three arms. You can say that humans are typically born with two arms, but trying to define human as something that's born with two arms would be factually incorrect.
You can't help but say a wrong thing in every single comment
Nobody chooses their gender. That's kind of the whole thing with dysphoria. If a trans person could simply choose to be the gender that matches their sex, they wouldn't have dysphoria
Okay, you're getting kinda annoying here. I was talking about biological genders and you start talking about dysphoria, which has absolutely nothing to do with that. I just have the feeling you are trying to derail the conversation to bitch about things I never even talked about.
I'm not going to respond to any other comments of you, but I do wish you a nice evening. :)
You brought up the concept of people being able to choose their gender. You think dysphoria has absolutely nothing to do with the interplay between a person's gender and biological sex? Hey by the way, "biological sex" is the thing that you talk about for a person's physical body. If you feel that people are misunderstanding you, maybe you should use the right words.
You can always choose to simply not leave comments about things you don't know anything about. I highly recommend it
Behold, a woman
You still haven't defined "female," you've just written paragraphs and paragraphs of behavior that you usually associate with female animals, while acknowledging that there are male animals that also exhibit those behaviors.
How do you define female?
And from a linguistical standpoint on the other hand...
... which I'm not talking about.