Check out this 10 minute short film. (Content warning: a little non-sexual nudity, and there is verbal sexual abuse here – although the shoe is on the other foot.)

This is an imaginary situation, call it a “world.” There are people there who physically resemble what we call “men” in our world (i.e. in reality). In this other world, are these people in fact women? Put differently, if the situation in the film were actual, would those sorts of people be women, while the kind of people with breasts and vaginas would all be men? It seems not!

About this film, Alex Byrne writes,

Evidently the point was not that males would have been women if society had been completely different. As the New York Times (correctly) puts it, “the parent doing the chores is a man, and all the gender roles are reversed, creating a world in which men confront what it would be like to face the daily indignities, compromises and risks that women often face”

Byrne, “Are women adult human females?” Section 2.5

If you agree with this point, then it looks like you should agree with AHF – that a woman is an adult human female. After all, if being a woman were a matter of having a certain social role, and being a man were a matter of having another social role, then if those those roles were swapped, then all the women would become men and all the men would become women.

But that’s not what we think would happen, as we accept AHF (and a corresponding thesis for men).