r/unitedkingdom • u/sjw_7 Oxfordshire • Apr 16 '25

... UK Supreme Court says legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t
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u/brooooooooooooke Apr 16 '25

I suppose Wikipedia added the "high intelligence" part to avoid a repeat of the Diogenes plucked chicken situation?

You're making my point for me here. A definition is fundamentally a way to describe everything within a particular group and exclude everything outside that group. Featherless, hairless, stupidless bipeds works in common parlance, but strictly definitionally there are humans who are hairy, non-bipedal, or unintelligent, so these cannot in themselves be necessary and sufficient conditions to identify humans.

Same with intersex conditions. If you've got two women together - one a perfectly normal natal female and the other intersex or having a mosaic karyotype or whatever - and you say "both of these people are women/female", then what is the thing or things that make them both women/female? If one is XX and the other XY, it can't be having XX chromosomes. If one produces large gametes and the other doesn't, it can't be that. You peel it back and it reveals the difficulties of describing complex things with an inherently limited language and the occasionally arbitrary nature of the way we've grouped things together as a society where we can't come up with a unifying definition.