Isn't there some ambiguity here?

We can say someone is a woman and mean several different things. It can mean just female, although this isn't usually the case, as you note.

​It can mean a grown up female - and this is connected to the biological ability to have children, as well as other characteristics of maturity.

 ​It can mean a sort of praise for a female who acts in a sufficiently grown up and feminine way; e.g., she's a real woman. I think the second option is the most normal way of using the term, and it suggests a biological aspect to its use beyond the sociocultural roles you mention. I'm also not sure if it is worth considering the issue of the nature of the sexes from our English use of the term woman.

 

ML wrote:

Ordinary language makes a distinction between being female and being a woman. For example, we don't refer to a 1-year old girl as a woman, even though we'd say she's female. Or we sometimes hear people say of a girl, "She's now a woman."

This suggests that being a woman is about taking on certain sociocultural roles, behaviors, attitudes, etc. If so, then why think it's impossible for someone born male to take on those roles, behaviors, attitudes, etc.? In short, why can't a biological male be a woman?

I think Jeremy is correct that the distinction between a one-year-old female and a twenty-four-year-old female with respect to womanhood does not necessarily suggest that womanhood does not require being female.

Of course, we are probably not going to find necessary and sufficient conditions for a term like "woman" in ordinary language. There is something socioculturally normative about it, but I don't think that undermines the term's descriptive dimension or connection to being female. One might say of the twenty-four-year-old female that she is not acting like a woman, in response to some irresponsible behavior, for instance. We typically wouldn't also say that she is not a woman, though, in the way that we would not say that an eleven-year-old female is not a woman. So I would say that "woman" probably means "adult female". That "she was not acting like a woman when she did that" and similar phrases are part of our language suggests to me that (often) there are commonly understood norms attendant upon being a woman, even if being a woman can be exhaustively described in biological terms of age and sex.

The question, then, is not, in my view, 'Can a male be a woman?'. Rather, the questions are 'Are the norms attendant on being a woman arbitrary?' and 'Is there any reason those norms should not be adopted by some males as well?' and 'To what extent should a polity favor one understanding of the norms attendant upon womanhood over another or over "none"?'. Those are ethical and political questions about the consequences for human behavior of sexual differentiation.

But is the question about sex and gender and the old questions of what they are and whether they can truly differ. I don't see the use of inserting term woman.

The issue is strange in the extreme. While we can perhaps agree that sex is distinct from gender (as being right-handed in the body is distinct from carrying out right-handed writing, shooting, boxing, and etc practice), the entire question ultimately revolves around the meaning and point of the roles. A very good male actor can play a convincing woman, certainly, but the whole point of the distinction of roles is that there are founded in tendencies in both sexes that support the social/personal roles that supervene on top of them. If we should like going on for another half century or more telling children they can literally be whatever they want to be, so be it, but this will be done without any regard to the individual happiness of the vast majority of people for whom tendencies will not support attempting to live a feminine life or vice versa.

Womanhood and manhood are tied to biology in that the roles make no sense in the absence of female and male. They would be absurd masquerades otherwise and of no more meaning than that I might happen to have always taken my tea with milk followed by sugar rather than sugar followed by milk. However, both common sense, learned experience, and biological science corroborate the strong relationship of sex to role, it doesn't take a lot of psychological observation to see why the roles differ in the general ways they do. There are, of course, unfair socio-economic ways of dealing with those roles, but that is what the law, not socio-biological ontology, is for.

Iwpoe - So would you say that womanhood isn't necessarily tied to biology, it's just that womanhood *should* be tied to biology? In other words, would you say that males can be women, it's just that they shouldn't?

Last edited by ML (7/15/2016 9:53 am)