What is a woman?

It's not as straightforward as the right would have you believe, because nothing is.

If you’re an American Conservative looking to score a viral moment with a liberal these days, the quickest route would be to ask them, “What is a woman?” 

It’s a trend that briefly made its way across the pond and flummoxed the Labour party as they struggled to come up with an answer that could please every side of the debate. 

The politics behind the question is, frankly, uninteresting. A tiny, tiny minority of people don’t identify with the gender they’re assigned at birth and choose to change it: what they want to call themselves is up to them, so long as we treat everyone with fairness and respect: both those entitled to single-sex spaces, and those who have made an undoubtedly difficult gender transition.

The far more interesting thing to think about is the linguistics of it all. What is a woman? 

It might be a question that challenges politicians, but it also challenges linguists. Because, after all, what is anything? 

If you look up a word in the dictionary, you will quite often find yourself going in circles. Look up “mountain” and you’ll be told that it’s “larger than a hill”, look up “hill” and you’ll find it is “smaller than a mountain”. You’ll find yourself in a never ending loop of words. The definition of “woman” points you to “female”, which in turn points you back to “woman”.

The reason lexicographers (the people who write dictionaries) find it so difficult to define words is because we don’t actually have a clear sense of how our brain defines words. Words are the only things that our brains seem to be able to remember in the tens of thousands of units, mostly effortlessly. How on earth is it storing all this information? Alphabetically? By sound? By meaning? Is ‘woman’ stored next to ‘female’ (because they mean the same thing), or ‘man’ (because they’re opposites), or ‘wombat’ (because they sound the same?).

Linguists have some interesting tricks for trying to answer these questions. They study people with a condition called aphasia, a fairly rare brain disorder. A person with aphasia has no mental impairment, they can think normally, but they lose the ability to use words properly. They may use the wrong words, or jumbled sentences, or no words at all. By assessing the damage to their brain in a CAT scan, you can start to paint a picture of how the physical organ that is the brain processes language. 

You can also induce in healthy subjects a ‘Tip Of the Tongue’ state. This is the moment where you can’t quite think of the word, but you definitely know it, and you know that you know it, and you’ll likely recall it after some prompting. (The way you study this, by the way, is by giving participants a list of general knowledge questions, and waiting for one that elicits an answer along the lines of: “Oh wait, I’m sure I know, I think it starts with an m, oh you know…”)

Linguists are obsessed with the question of how words are stored in the mind, and the mental process we go through to retrieve them, but even the best methods of study can only give a glimpse into the brain’s reality. There is stark disagreement between the experts on how words and their meanings are stored.

We might store words by connecting them to features. For example, ‘dog’ gets connected to ‘four-legged’, ‘hairy’, ‘animal’, and ‘comes up to a human hip or lower’. You can imagine your brain working a bit like a computer programme, as it looks at an item and assigns an ever-increasing number of categories until there is only one word option left that accurately represents the object. 

We might store words by holding prototypes or ‘exemplars’. For example, we keep in our mind an image of a prototypical, ‘perfect’ dog (or perhaps, 20 prototypical dogs) and compare the things we see in the world to the existing prototypes we have. 

But there’s some flaws with both of these models. We’d still recognise a dog as a dog if it had dyed pink hair and no legs (despite not meeting a core characteristic of dogs as four-legged, and being nothing like any prototypical dog). Our brains clearly have some far smarter model for assigning a word to abstracts than any model can explain. 

This complexity can be used to bamboozle a well-meaning liberal with a question like ‘what is a woman’. But when you think about it, you can do it with just about anything. 

What is a cake? 

Easy, it’s a food made from flour, milk and eggs. 

But is a vegan cake still a cake? 

OK, well then a cake is something that looks like this: 🎂 

But what about those novelty cakes shaped as iPhones or golf clubs? 

OK, fine, a cake is a sweet baked good covered in icing. 

Ah, so a cookie is a cake? 

…

You see the problem - you can do this with just about any word and fall into all the same trap.

What if I just call something a cake, is that enough to make it a cake? 

In 1991, HMRC told the confectionary company McVities that they owed a massive VAT bill - for the sale of Jaffa Cakes. While cakes and biscuits are zero-rated for VAT, chocolate covered biscuits pay the standard rate of VAT, and HMRC insisted that Jaffa Cakes - in spite of their name - were biscuits. McVities insisted they were cakes.

The judge ruled in favour of Team Cakes: sparing Jaffa Cakes from VAT. In part, the judge reasoned, because Jaffa Cakes are called cakes, and therefore should be treated as such. If it looks like a cake, tastes like a cake, and calls itself a cake…

There’s a much deeper philosophical layer to all of this: words are perhaps the most influential man-made creation on the planet. They shape our entire perception of the world, but they are ultimately changeable, unfixed, flawed, lawless and subjective notions. Whether it’s a woman, or a cake, or a feeling, or something else: there is no such thing as simple meaning, really, and that gets us into all sorts of debacles.