Conor Matthews
1 min readJun 17, 2022

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Most people understand "woman" to mean an adult human female, chromasomally oriented toward egg production and gestation.

Ah, straight away we've come into a snag. My partner has Turner's Syndrome, which means though she is Cis and female, her XX chromosomes are partially incomplete and (in her case) she can't produce eggs. So even the accepted broad definition we start with before moving on to trans inclusion already disqualifies many women. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying "typically this is what the word woman refers to and here are the nuance exceptions", but my gripe is with those who think the nuances must be worked into the typical definition without fluidity or being too broad. In the same way I know you didn't mean anything negative by the definition most people would think of when they think of a woman, we understand words are the sounds and symbols representative of larger, more complex abstract ideas; in this case gender presentation and identity. It's not that everything is fluid, but that everything has an exception. A whippet is a dog, but not all dogs are whippets. The acknowledgement of exceptions is not the erasure of the word, but acting like the word is all-encompassing in of itself is the erasure of the exceptions.

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