Byrne writes that

One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and “woman” is the only candidate [for such a word].

“Are women adult human females?” section 2

He observes that English has lots of words for adult females of other species, e.g. “sow,” “hen,” or “doe.” On this last, I would have thought that a “doe” is always a deer, but apparently it is used more widely too. Similarly with “sow” – it means an adult female pig, but it can also mean an adult female of other species, such as a bear.

I think that “woman” is not ambiguous with regard to species; to talk about a woman is to talk about a member of the species homo sapiens. What kind of member? One which is both adult and female.

Put differently, if you say “_____ is a woman,” there are three ways this can be false. The thing in question might not be a human, as in the case of the movie-star dog Lassie. Or it might not be an adult, like your three-year-old niece. Or it might not be female, like Vladimir Putin. (Of course “____ is a woman” might also be false also because the thing fails to meet all three requirements, or two of the three.)

All of this is seems rather obvious. Why? Because “A woman is an adult human female” and related sentences like “No woman is non-human,” “All women are female,” and “Any woman is an adult” all seem to be what philosophers have called analytic truths.

An analytic truth is a statement which is true and which is automatically known to be true by anyone who understands the terms involved. It is, in short, true by definition (i.e. by the definitions of the words involved.) One doesn’t need to go looking for evidence for or against the claim to determine whether it is true or false; that would be a waste of time, since one realizes that it is true just in virtue of the meanings of the words involved.

Rightly does Byrne comment, “Of the six considerations [in this article in favor of his thesis AHF] this is perhaps the most compelling.” Yes, if someone wants to deny that “No bachelor is married” – well, that looks like a lost cause! Its falsity would require a bachelor who is married. But a “bachelor” is by definition unmarried.

Someone might of course insist on using the word “bachelor” with a newly coined meaning, so that it means, I don’t know, “guy would we be fun to date,” and not “unmarried adult male human.” But such a person would be changing the subject away from bachelors, to some other class of men.

It’s not clear then that Byre’s thesis AHF – that something is a woman if and only if it is an adult human female – even needs to be argued for, since a woman is just conceptually adult, human, and female – that’s what, typically, we mean by saying that someone is a “woman.”

He adds that,

Someone who wants to deny AHF needs to explain why this pattern of gendered [or, sexed] animal words leaves us [humans] out.

I agree. Just as farmers and ranchers and rangers need a word for adult females of various species, so human beings clearly need a word for something which is adult, human, and female. And of course “woman” is that word in English. And Byrne mentions that

“Woman” is likely one of the very few lexical universals.

That is, I take it, one of the very few words such that it has an equivalent in all human languages. Well of course! How could it be otherwise? Any group of humans is going to need to talk specifically about adult human females, so a word would be in order.

Certainly, many gender ideologues think that the important word “woman” should be re-defined to mean something else. (Should that happen, of course, given human interests we’d immediately need another word that means “adult human female.”)

But based on conversations, it seems to me that some realize that such a basic word is never going to be redefined, so they have conceded that a woman is by definition a female, but are now urging that what a female is doesn’t essentially have to do with biological facts, but has rather to do with mental or societal facts.

Then, however, they seem to be in the teeth of science, specifically, biology. Is this easier than fighting the dictionary makers or all English speakers?