which properties are gender properties?
(a user’s guide to wokeist standard english (1 of 4))
~2728 words (~10 minute read)
21 05 2026
introduction
It’s become progressive dictum that ‘female’ and ‘male’ are sexual, biological properties, while ‘woman’ and ‘man’ (or ‘girl’ and ‘boy’) are both gender properties. I’m skeptical of this view. I take it instead that ‘female’ is a gender property (not a sex property), and ‘woman’ is neither a sex nor a gender property. ‘Woman,’ rather, like ‘huntress’ or ‘policewoman,’ designates an intersection of individuals who all share a gender, but is not itself a gender. ‘Huntress’ is not a gender, but all huntresses share the gender ‘female’: ‘woman’ is not a gender, but all women share the gender ‘female’. I am compelled, then, to (roughly) agree with Merriam-Webster or Oxford or Cambridge’s definitions of ‘woman,’ reading ‘adult female human.’
evidence
behaviors of speakers
The preceding theses, to me, seem to fall out of easy-to-access facts regarding the habits of users of trans-inclusive gender concepts. On Rate Your Music, for example, one will find transfeminine artists on lists of female fronted emo bands, transfeminine singers described as female vocalists, and transfeminine users identifying as female on their profile. Users, further, balk at the inclusion of nonbinary-identifying vocalists on these ‘female-fronted emo’ lists (without regard for their assigned gender at birth), and, surely, would protest even louder if the vocals of trans women were tagged as ‘male’.
Take another example. ‘Transpeak,’ the most popular trans-oriented Discord server (with 30,000 members), lists ‘female’ and ‘male’ as gender options for role selection. ‘Transfem hangout,’ the top result for ‘transfem’ in the server search (and in the top 5 for ‘trans’ alone) lists only ‘male’ and ‘female’ as gender options, without listing ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ In both cases, ‘female’ and ‘male’ roles are regularly self-applied by trans women and trans men respectively.
Rate Your Music and Discord are, admittedly, quite online, and (in the listed servers) highly progressive. My semantic thesis applies beyond these bastions of wokeism, though. For example, The State Department under the Biden administration allowed one to change their gender marker on their passport, providing ‘M(ale),’ ‘F(emale),’ or ‘X’ options. The State Department, obviously, did not believe that one’s self-attestation had anything to do with their sex assigned at birth; the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ were used to refer to the gender of the passport holder (as the language used by the State Department makes clear). To pile on slightly more: the style guide for the APA urges use of ‘female’ to track self-identification (and not sex), Merriam-Webster offers a definition of ‘female’ in terms of ones identity (and no similar definition for ‘woman’), and so does Oxford.
This, in all, seems to indicate that there exists a fairly wide contingent of English speakers who use the word ‘female’ as a gender term, including not only specialists or institutions, but also the folk. This isn’t all that unexpected: ‘female’ is more naturally used as an adjective than ‘woman’ (this is the suggestion of the AP styleguide, for example), and it would be a terrible loss in expressive power if we had no adjective describing the gender shared in common by trans and cis women and girls. ‘Woman or girl,’ when wanting to talk nominally about people with this gender, is a bit of a mouthful as well.
upholding common sense
Further, it seems that this is the only sort of view which can uphold commonsensical truths about the genders of women and girls. Consider, firstly, that women and girls share a gender in common. But (at least some) women are not girls, and vice-versa. So, the gender shared in common by all women and girls cannot be ‘woman’ or ‘girl,’ but must be some other property. Considering that at least some such women and girls have only one gender (although some, of course, may be bigender), we can conclude that ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ themselves are not genders, as, if they were, the putatively monogender girls and women in question would have two genders (viz., ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ and the one they share in common with non-women or non-girls, respectively).
An example might make this point clearer. Baby ‘Cassie’ is a neonate, age 0, and her mother ‘Lilith’ is an adult, age 25. These three points are of the most importance: (1), Cassie and Lilith have a gender in common; (2), Cassie and Lilith (we can stipulate) both have only one gender; and (3), Cassie and Lillith do not share ‘being a woman’ in common, and do not share ‘being a girl’ in common. Because (1), they share a gender, and (3), they do not have ‘being a woman’ or ‘being a girl’ in common, the gender they share in common cannot be ‘woman’ or ‘girl’; they do not share these properties in common. (A scarlet tomato and a crimson apple, for example, have a color in common, but this color cannot be ‘scarlet’ or ‘crimson’ because the apple is not scarlet and the tomato is not crimson). If the gender they share in common is not ‘woman’, or ‘girl’, then Cassie and Lilith must both have a gender property that they can share in common, some property that is not exclusive to only one of them. This is why (2), that they are monogender, is important: if Cassie and Lilith each have one gender, then the gender property that they share in common can be their only gender. But this property cannot be ‘woman’ or ‘girl,’ because they do not share that in common. So, ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ are not gender properties.
The same observation can be made regarding monogender girls reaching adulthood and becoming women. Such women have not changed genders, although they’ve stopped being girls and started being women. If ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ pointed out gender properties (and, if they are distinct properties, which they surely are), then such women would have changed genders: they would have lost their old gender and taken on another.
'adult human female' and 'trans women are women'
‘Adult human female,’ prima facie, seems to be quite a good definition for ‘woman.’ The naive wokeist rejects it on reasonable ethical grounds–viz., the conviction that the accuracy of such a definition implies that trans women are not women–but this is in spite of its prima facie accuracy, not a defeater for such accuracy. But, my view, that ‘adult human female’ designates a gender property, is able to accommodate both the conviction that trans women are women, and the prima facie plausible analysis of ‘woman’ as ‘adult human female.’ If we antecedently accept that trans women are women, then the view that ‘female’ is a gender term seems best able to accomodate other plausible semantic theses regarding our gender vocabulary.
the proliferation of agab vocabulary
The existence of AGAB vocabulary, as well, seems to confirm the prior thesis. If ‘female’ pointed out the same biological property as ‘AFAB,’ then there would be no reason to expect the coining and proliferation of the latter. But my thesis–that ‘female’ has evolved to not point out a biological property at all–fully expects the proliferation of a new word (AFAB) to take up the role that ‘female’ previously did. Something structurally identical happened when English lost its second-person plural pronoun, ‘thou,’ and, as a consequence, gained many makeshift constructions to fill ‘thou’’s vacant seat, like ‘youse’ and ‘y’all.’ A similar story might be told regarding ‘they’’s ascendancy as a gender-neutral pronoun following ‘he’’s loss of this sense. Such coinings, in general, seem to be a sign that a semantic narrowing has happened upstream, and a new tool is needed for the purpose no longer served by the old term.
To some, however, the proliferation of AGAB vocabulary is evidence that my thesis is false: that words like ‘male’ and ‘female’ do take on a biological sense. After all, what are the load-carrying words in phrases like ‘assigned male at birth’ and ‘assigned female at birth’ which disambiguate the biology of the subjects under discussion? Surely not the ones in common between both expressions (the ‘assigned … at birth’), but, if not these, then it must be the only words left, viz., ‘male’ and ‘female.’ But if these words can do this sort of work, then they must take on some sort of biological meaning in their application to humans. In response to this sort of argument, I take it that phrases like ‘assigned male at birth’ or ‘natal female’ (and the infinitely many permutations of woke ways to talk about sex) simply preserve archaic meanings of these expressions within fixed expressions. The phenomenon occurring here is in the neighborhood of the phenomenon of ‘fossil words,’ where archaic words find exclusive use in fixed contexts, like in ‘bated breath,’ ‘to and fro,’ or ‘eke out.’ Some expressions like this, however, involve archaic meanings of words which also take on novel, contemporary meanings: for example, the archaic meaning of ‘quick’ (alive) is preserved in expressions like ‘cut to the quick’ or ‘the quick and the dead,’ although ‘quick’ takes on a separate meaning (fast) in common use. A similar story is to be told in the case of WSE’s usage of ‘female’ and ‘male’ in fixed expressions like ‘AMAB.’ ‘Female’ alone, applied to humans, only ever refers to a gender property, but maintains its archaic, biological meaning, in fixed expressions like ‘assigned female at birth.’
objections
I am really surprised that any view to the contrary has gained substantial stock among people who are putatively trans inclusive. When I see progressives assenting to the view that trans women are male, I can’t help but detect in them a pang of guilt, a pain of conscience, and an ache of the tooth that comes from biting a bad bullet. I am sincerely skeptical that anyone who has escaped a lukewarm progressivism–who has graduated to a trans activism that outstrips superficial assent to a series of popular slogans–even believes that ‘male’ (in its application to human beings) is a sex term alongside all of this thesis’ unsavory corollaries. At the very best, it seems to be the sort of position that they take to be more defensible than the one under which they really operate; one which they present to conservatives to avoid the burden of defending a more precarious (but more sincere) view. What objections could there be to my view which makes progressives reluctant to defend it? Not any convincing ones, I think.
female animals
There is, initially, a question of how this view accounts for the fact that ‘female’ and ‘male’ (and some terms sufficient for their application, too, like gendered pronouns) seem to be applicable to non-human animals, who presumably do not have genders? The solution, while not astoundingly straightforward, does not make any special exceptions of gender vocabulary. I take it that ‘male’ is a term whose meaning shifts based on the animacy of the subject: when applied to humans (at the top of the animacy hierarchy), it designates a gender, and when applied to animals (who occupy an intermediate position on the animacy hierarchy), it designates a sex. When applied to some inanimate objects, it designates some feature analogous to the maleness exhibited by non-human animals. So, ‘there are female deer and humans’ would be a case of zeugma (but would nonetheless be felicitous), synonymous to ‘there are humans who self-identify as ‘female’ and animals who have these-and-these biological properties.’
I’m fine to grant that this view is complex, but not in any significant way when compared to other analyses of our gender concepts. Note that, minimally and uncontroversially, there will be a difference in the meaning of the word ‘male’ when applied to animate and inanimate nouns: electrical sockets and dogs can both be female, but not in the same sense. This fact is one of which every view, if it wants to do any justice to natural language, will have to make sense, and this will require positing some polysemy in the ‘female’ predicate which is disambiguated by the nature of the subject to which it’s applied. The story regarding these two senses of ‘female’ and their disambiguation (through animacy) is something already-present (in cases like the dog and the electrical socket) which my view only borrows and extends.
