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tcunningham's avatar

What is a woman?

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el gato malo's avatar

an adult human female.

adult: having reached reproductive age/physical/sexual maturity

human: homo sapiens

female: an animal whose reproductive organs are centered around producing large gametes (eggs).

people like to try to muddy this idea with corner cases like "so if your reproductive features are absent/removed/failed to develop, you are not a woman?" but this seems an invalid line of objection. humans have 10 fingers. if you have 9, you're still human, you're just a damaged or incomplete one. gender is no different.

if one castrates a bull, no one calls it a cow.

you develop testes or ovaries depending on whether you have a Y chromosome. (SRY, sex determining region of Y chromosome)

Sex-determining region Y protein (SRY), or testis-determining factor (TDF), is a DNA-binding protein (also known as gene-regulatory protein/transcription factor) encoded by the SRY gene that is responsible for the initiation of male sex determination in therian mammals (placental mammals and marsupials).[5] SRY is an intronless sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome.[6] mutations in this gene lead to a range of disorders of sex development with varying effects on an individual's phenotype and genotype.

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BradK (Afuera!)'s avatar

Try explaining that to a room full of entitled, triggered undergrads who are shouting you down with chants of "Right-wing conspiracy theory!"

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Dr Linda's avatar

Do you face that? That should never occur

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BradK (Afuera!)'s avatar

I don't face it personally, no. But then I would never walk into such a viper's nest in the first place.

Shouting down their opponents has been a tried and true tactic of the neo-Marxists ever since that pseudo-ideology first emerged. They know their positions cannot withstand even the slightest of scrutiny and therefore never engage in rational debate. Instead they gang up on the "other" and overwhelm them not with logic but with primal screams. Then they declare victory, "Our ideas have won the day!"

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VeryVer's avatar

I’m an actual woman and I’m puzzled why anyone would want to be one, lol. If these guys actually succeeded at “being women” then everyone would promptly start to ignore them. Lol.

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Mike's avatar

If they actually succeeded at “being women” they would beg for mercy and go back to calling themselves men.

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Dr Linda's avatar

Thank you for that

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Efferous's avatar

For the majority of them, it's not that they "want" to be female exactly, but that they derive sexual excitement by cosplaying it. Autogynephilia is the psychological term for it.

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VeryVer's avatar

That’s just so creepy. There is a real instinctive disgust at men getting their jollies inappropriately.

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Bootsorourke's avatar

I've seen them identifying as "AGP", including Lia Thomas

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Dr Linda's avatar

I can’t understand how they can can even say they feel like a woman. It does not compute.

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May 11, 2023
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Bootsorourke's avatar

You do know about the ones shoving raspberry ice pops into lower orifices so they can have a red period?

they deserve that pain but it's not the same

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Bootsorourke's avatar

I am happy to be a woman.

I wasn't always. Glad no one interfered or made me decide. I'm all leather and lace now.

I agree we get ignored, but we're tough enough to overcome that.

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Mystic William's avatar

Sorry. Did you say something?

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Scuba Cat's avatar

Okay, this is all true. However, biological sex is not exactly the same as gender. Biological sex is fixed. It cannot be altered. You have defined it exactly correctly. However, gender roles can vary based on time and place. There have always been some people who don't fit the traditional gender roles of their societies, biological sex notwithstanding. For example, I think things like being more social or domestic are thought of as feminine characteristics, but they are more cultural than biogical.

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el gato malo's avatar

i mean, sure. when i was growing up, we had phrases like "tomboy" for girls who "liked boy stuff." i was friends with some. they were great. but everyone, including them knew they were girls. i'm not sure how this whole "people are different and like different things" got turned into some sort of fight about biological sex. it feels like a contrived and needless conflict.

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Scuba Cat's avatar

Agreed. My husband thinks it's a push toward transhumanism.

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May 11, 2023
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Bootsorourke's avatar

I can't even imagine no longer feeling the skin on skin touch with another, the warmth, the smell, the texture, the vibration, the moisture...

uh. I'd better stop....

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AndyinBC's avatar

"feels like a contrived and needless conflict" may not be a sufficiently powerful observation. Perhaps "IS an insane contrived and needless conflict" might more aptly describe the current madness.

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SnowInTheWind's avatar

And terms like "sissy" or "fairy" for boys who liked girl stuff. The issue has never been about chromosomal or gonadal sex. The question is about brain wiring, or neurological sex/gender. Are masculine and feminine personalities innate in the brains we are born with, or are they cultural constructs that are arbitrarily brainwashed into children to get their behavior to match the gender "roles" demanded by their society?

The neo-Marxist side generally abhors the idea that some classes of people are mentally wired differently than other classes, because their power hinges on the belief that they can create Utopia by conditioning and manipulating people, and innate mentalities refutes the faith in blank-slate humanity that that belief depends upon.

At the same time, the neo-Marxists are now largely allied with, if not coopted by, LGBT+ activists. Homosexuality and transgender both imply abnormal brain-wiring in certain minorities of people. In alliance, the two groups are fundamentally conflicted here, with opposing assumptions, and they mostly try to avoid the issue to keep on good terms with each other.

The simplest and most biologically plausible explanation is that the would-be controllers on the neo-Marxist side are completely wrong, and that people are born with innate gender proclivities, whether masculine, feminine, or intermediate. The vast majority of the time, male sex organs predict a masculine personality and female organs predict a feminine personality. But that masculine or feminine personality resides in the brain, not the chromosomes or the sex organs, and sometimes the developmental process goes awry and a male body nevertheless produces a partly feminine wiring of the brain, or a female body produces a partly masculine wiring. This is a birth defect, and it happens to a minority of people.

What we do with such people is a political question that deserves to be discussed honestly with the aim of providing fair and humane options both for these people, and for the great majority of people who are normal.

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Bootsorourke's avatar

I have friends who live in that fluid area and it can be beautiful if it's real.

So many now are not that. That's why they are angry

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Scuba Cat's avatar

Yes! There is an element of social contagion that no one is allowed to talk about and people in power seem to be encouraging it. That makes me suspicious (and also why my husband thinks it is about transhumanism). Young people transitioning today are much different than those who transitioned in the 1990s, who actually wanted to live as the other gender.

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Mystic William's avatar

You are falling for their propaganda. They’ve invented a term, gender, made us all respond to it in a certain way, then they have moved the Overton Window another foot or so. There is sex. Gender is meaningless. We all recognize many people act differently than one would expect. That isn’t a different gender. It is a different action.

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SnowInTheWind's avatar

I think I just learned something new. So monotremes don't do the X and Y chromosome thing for sex determination?

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Bootsorourke's avatar

THANK YOU!

esp love the cow line

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Ivan Iriarte's avatar

Exactly...

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Katherine's avatar

Me. I am a woman. Born with XX not XY. Never felt like a girl, or a women, just like a "being," until post puberty when suddenly boys, instead of being relatively annoying, magically became somehow appealing, lol.

After falling in love, (with a member of the XY tribe, of course,) and enjoying all the pleasures, and the heartbreaks that that experience entails, I eventually conceived and delivered a gorgeous baby girl, who I nursed, looked after, and raised to become a woman herself.

It is through the play of biology, genetics, our endocrine systems and all the hormones and brain differences that make each one of us "male" or "female."

And it is through our lived experiences that we come to know the meaning of our "sex."

I, and other women, have, on average, a larger connection between the right and left hemispheres of my brain, higher intuition, sensitivity, and conscientiousness. Took me a while but I came to highly appreciate the gifts of being female. ; )))

Males have larger muscles, greater strength, bigger hearts, lungs, livers, and higher competiveity and aggression. We need those characteristics also, in society.

We females have an entire infrastructure that males lack. (Can create new humans inside our bodies and feed them afterwards too!)

The drumbeat of either testosterone, testosterone, testosterone or the symphony that is estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, etc., play very different tunes.

We as a species would be smart to figure this one out and get to know our own sex, and the other one, a whole lot better! That plus understanding the Dark Triad types might end a lot of our problems, perhaps even our endless wars and the corruption in the Fascistic Government we currently are facing....

Just saying.

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AndyinBC's avatar

My wife said, "You tell 'em Katherine!".

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BradK (Afuera!)'s avatar

You'll have to ask a politician.

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Rosemary B's avatar

.... and they will ask a "SUPREME court Judge Nominee"

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

If you're stuck in LA traffic for hours and can tinkle in a Gatorade bottle, you're male.

If you can't; you're female or have a vanishgingly rare deformity.

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