Maya Forstater

You are carving out exceptions on an ad-hoc basis based on your own distaste for the regressive definition of womanhood that you are promoting (eg as being "sufficiently like the thing that can make eggs).

your definition necessarily involves grey areas and subjective judgement because you refuse - rightly - to go ahead and say that women must be producing eggs etc. however, since you are willing to hold a subjective grey area definition, there is now a broader question that arises

that is: in this case as in almost every case, definitions, unlike facts, are not objective truths about the universes but constructions that exist only to be used by human beings. so we must ask, what is the definition of "woman" FOR?

that being the case, we can construct it considering the pros and cons of various options, as we do in many other cases. i believe you are not considering the harmful consequences that your biologically-based definition has for trans folks.

Currently, trans women face specific discrimination *as women*. They face misogyny, magnified tenfold. For example, trans women face more domestic violence than trans men do AND more than cis women do http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Intimate-Partner-Violence-and-Sexual-Abuse-among-LGBT-People.pdf …

the pernicious idea that trans women are not "real women" is thought to contribute both to this pattern and other aspects of transmisogyny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmisogyny …

holding onto a biologically-grounded notion of womanhood has little practical benefit in day to day life, and is regressive in that it ignores the psychological and social aspects of gender while harming a vulnerable community in the process.

Rachel - I think if we didn't have a word for adult human females we'd have to invent one. But let's say you are right and there is no information content in that word, its not a real thing. Let's get rid of it. Let's pretend the word never existed....