[Esme nha Maire]

Hmmn... for myself, being a woman is simply a descriptor that comes with the territory of being female. Now I come to think about it, I tend to use the term woman as a more informal/less clinical substitute for the word female.

I think perhaps that the issue you're addressing here has to do with a combination of societal attitudes and occasional sloppiness of thinking that most humans tend to engage in at times.

That is to say, that western society around the time I was born clearly had notions as to what men and women were capable of and what their place and function in society was - and because 'society' is made up of people, that's indicative of what a lot of people thought was the natural order of things, despite the fact that a not inconsiderable number were kicking against those confines on a daily basis!

However, society has moved on somewhat - it is better accepted nowadays (though not entirely yet) that the old societal expectations and values of men and women were overly limiting and harmful, and that women - and indeed men - should be free to be however they durned well please, so long as they are not behaving sociopathically.

Which is nice. And yet - in general, men and women are not the same whether one looks at biological or social aspects - and be it noted that the biological underpins the social, although not in as simplistic a way as many like to presume. There have been many times when I have craved the company of other women, not because I am lesbian and may fancy some of them, but simply because they are women, they are 'similar to me' whilst men are 'other', and thus there is more likely to be some commonality of experience, of attitude, of ways of thinking about the world around us with other women than is the case when I only have men to talk to.

The tricky bit is that underlying biology. Some folk would like it to be as simple as what sort of genitalia one is born with, but vast quantities of evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, say otherwise. Some think that chromosomes are sufficient to determine whether one is male or female, but there have been cases which show that to not be so, too (I am minded of the case of a UK woman who had a bit of a shock when she found that the reason she was infertile had to do with her being chromosomally XY - evidently as a foetus she was insensitive to testosterone, and thus did not develop as a male physically).

Biology is fantastically complicated, far more so than most people seem to realise. I've just had my mind somewhat blown by coming across details of how it is that DNA (an insanely long and complex class of molecules) gets to be bundled into chromosomes. DNA itself consists of a helix, but that is then wrapped around itself, the result wrapped around itself again and so on for two more levels before proteins called condensin 1 and 2 finish the job of packaging. It all makes folk expert at origami look like rank amateurs that can barely fold a sheet of paper in half!

The DNA can be thought of as a huge set of switches determining this or that aspect of our bodies functioning - and yet it isnt a simple case of one switch, one thing affected either/or - many of the switches have to work in concert for things to proceed normally, and if they do not, well, the results may vary from an imperceptible difference in an individual to quite dramatically obvious differences, depending on what it is that;s affected.

During foetal development, timing is critical. Washes of hormones sweep over the foetus and activate different bits of development at different times. If the timing is off even slightly, it has consequences. If the foetus is insensitive to one or other hormone, it has consequences. And those consequences may be not just physical, but mental, because the brain is a physical thing, and its wiring/programming, so to speak, is affected by how it develops, and part of that is whether it has received instructions to create a male type brain or a female type brain - and those instructions are complex and may not be implemented 100% one way or the other. Despite the failsafes built into our genetics, things can and do go awry to greater or lesser degree.

There is still a great deal to learn about all of this. The stuff about condensin was only found out by scientists fairly recently. Work continues on discovering how the brain develops and works, but it isn't all guesswork these days. Things have moved on enormously from the level of knowledge that existed back in the early to mid twentieth century, and some of that knowledge has important ramifications both for society as a whole and for feminisim in particular.

But getting back to the more mundane - personally, based on what I currently know, I think I would stick with woman being simply a colloquial term for a female human. If you invoke the notion of some kind of societal concept of womanhood, then you are immediately (a) allowing an excuse for yobs to chastise those women who do not fit that societal construct for simply being themselves, and (b) by the same token, unless the societal concept explicitly specifies gender identity, then you may include some males that fit the criteria. Which would be odd. Correction - I would find that kinda odd.*

Put simply, society is lazy and doesnt define social roles well - a lot of handwaving and "y'know!"'s are involved. But if you want to nail down what a woman is, hard and fast, then you have no option but to go into a welter of complexity that few would be willing to do, fewer would be willing to do objectively, and even fewer would be capable of doing so objectively. Specifying genitalia at birth or chromosomes simply does not cut it.

The pragmatic option, of course, is that a woman is a person that self-identifies as a woman. That neatly does away with any concerns about what genitalia someone was born with, what they are chromosomally, or fretting over whether that medication that Mum took during pregnancy may have affected ones development, etc. Frankly, a woman is a person that identifies as a woman and she can be whatever she damned well pleases and has the ability to be. In my opinion.

Esme

* But see my comment in another thread about how maybe Butch and Femme might be more fundamental socially than masculinity/femininity - that is to say, people can be Butch or Femme irrespective of their gender identity, and in some general social situations that may be more important than gender/gender identity (although gender is most definitely important when it comes to getting up close and personal in bed, of course!)