Are Women Adult Human Females? A Radical Feminist Reply to Alex Byrne

Alex Byrne's 2020 paper might win the battle for the gender-critical movement, but it loses the war. Even if his conclusion is accepted, it offers little of value for contemporary feminist debate.

Alex Byrne’s 2020 article “Are women adult human females?” criticizes the traditional feminist view that the term ‘woman’ refers to a socially constructed category. Byrne holds that the term ‘woman’ refers to a biologically delineated category - ‘adult human female’ - and that the question of who is a woman is distinct from the question of who ought to be treated as a woman. 

Gender critical feminists and allies have hailed Byrne’s paper as offering a commonsense definition of ‘woman’ that can be used to securely defend women’s spaces. 

I think there are legitimate issues with the positive arguments Byrne makes for considering women to be adult human females, but I will not address them specifically here. Instead, I will provide an argument to show that, even if Byrne is correct, his discovery offers little insight into contemporary debates over gender and sex; questions over whether an individual is a woman can be and will be restated as questions over whether an individual ought to be treated as a woman. 

Byrne’s Position

Byrne offers several arguments for believing women to be adult human females. 

He begins by pointing out the dictionary defines women in this way; it would be unlikely, he claims, that dictionaries would make such a major mistake as describing a social category as a biological one. He points out further that humans have terms for adult male and adult female animals of other species; logically, we would expect there to be a term for adult human females of our species, and the most likely contender is ‘woman’. Popular media tends to describe adult human females as women regardless of the social circumstances of those women; for example, female people in a swapped gender role show are still referred to as ‘women’, and an ancient matrilineal female human ancestor is referred to as a ‘woman’. This evidence, Byrne claims, suggests that ‘woman’ is a term that references a biological category, that of adult human females. ‘Woman’, then, is not a term like ‘wife’ or ‘firefighter’ (which both reference social roles) but more like ‘diabetic’, in that it is structured by biology. 

Byrne responds to several objections to his view. One such objection relates to intersex individuals with an invented intersex disorder known as Complete Asexual Syndrome (CAS). People with CAS are not female, but their bodies have a disorder that causes their bodies to appear female. If individuals with CAS are women, the position that ‘someone is a woman if and only if they are an adult human female’ is not true.’

Byrne does not directly say that he believes CAS individuals are men or non-women. But he seems to endorse the view that they are not female, while adding: 

“Are CAS individuals women? Naturally they are, and should be, treated as women in all but certain infrequent medical situations. In particular, they should be called ‘women’. But there is a difference between being an F and being (rightly) treated as an F. (Here we are presupposing a clear understanding of ‘treating someone as an F’.18) Some children should be treated as adults. Conversely, some adults should be treated as children. Usually, being an F is neither necessary nor sufficient for being (rightly) treated as one. Even if CAS individuals are not women, only an obtuse moralistic pedant would deny them entry to a space marked ‘Woman Only’; the same kind of inflexible literal-mindedness would prevent groundskeepers from mowing a patch of turf with a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign. Spaces marked ‘Females Only’ illustrate the same point. CAS individuals are not female, but everyone agrees that any rights and privileges afforded to females should apply to them too. Any inclination to say that CAS individuals are women might be largely driven by failing to make the distinction between being (rightly) treated as a woman and actually being one.

Thus Byrne holds that, possibly, CAS individuals are not ‘women’ but ought to be treated ‘as women’. Alternatively, he suggests that the definition of ‘woman’ could be massaged a bit to include CAS individuals while retaining its biological character. He suggests:

...we have moved no distance at all from the idea that woman is a biological category—it is merely a somewhat more complicated biological category than adult human female. Specifically: someone is a woman iff [if and only if] she is either an adult human female or an adult human with CAS, or perhaps something a little fancier. And as far as this paper goes, that revision of AHF will do.

Finally, Byrne considers the objection that “transwomen” (who are biologically male but identify as women) are actually women, thus violating the biconditional definition of ‘woman’. Byrne points out that the claim transwomen are women is far from universally accepted, even among trans people themselves, and therefore can’t be used as evidence against the biological definition of womanhood; whether transwomen are women is something that is still under contention.

Byrne’s conclusion, even if accepted, does not resolve any of the substantive questions in contemporary gender-critical debates.

The central issue with Byrne’s argument relates to his claim that there may be an obligation to “treat [non-female] people as ‘women’.” Given the position that ‘woman’ is a biological category like ‘diabetic’, it is left unclear what this entails or why such an obligation would exist. Byrne clarifies by making a comparison to adults and children, both of which he views as biological categories:

Some children should be treated as adults. Conversely, some adults should be treated as children.

Here Byrne seems to be endorsing the idea that there are two relevant groups of people when discussing age categories:

ADULT: a biological category for humans who have reached a developmental milestone.

ADULT+ : a socially constructed category for humans who should be treated like adults.

And there seem to be analogous groups for women:

WOMAN: a biological category for adult human females. 

WOMAN+: a socially constructed category for individuals (female or not) who should be treated like women. 

Byrne offers the following to explain what being ‘treated like a woman’ might involve:

“In particular, they should be called ‘women’...CAS individuals are not female, but everyone agrees that any rights and privileges afforded to females should apply to them too.”

So “being treated like a woman”, in this context, involves being referred to as a ‘woman’, being referred to with she/her pronouns, and having access to women-only spaces and opportunities. (Importantly, “being treated like a woman” encompasses virtually all the demands currently made by the transgender community.) But if Byrne believes we should treat CAS people as women, Byrne is proposing the existence of a socially constructed category (WOMAN+) that contains both female people (excluding those who should properly be referred to as men) and some non-female people who share some paradigmatic similarity with femaleness. In other words, WOMAN+ is a category that is not biological and whose boundaries are mediated socially. But this social category is explicitly what social constructivists identify as womanhood itself.

This Venn diagram illustrates the categories mentioned above. Notably, what practically matters in feminist/GC debates is who exists in WOMAN+. Byrne’s paper offers little insight into this question.

Byrne can certainly argue that the word ‘woman’ doesn’t refer to the socially constructed category WOMAN+, but in doing so, he still acknowledges that this category exists and that it is of primary relevance in feminist and social matters. This is what I mean when I say Byrne has won the battle but lost the war - he may be able to win ‘woman’ as meaning ‘adult human female’, but in the process, he has been forced to acknowledge the existence of a social category that aligns almost perfectly with the traditional social constructivist account of gender (one which he recognizes as being of primary social relevance in many ways, ways of great interest to contemporary feminist debates).

For those who are concerned purely about the technical definition of the word ‘woman’, this may be an acceptable cost. But the majority of the discourse around the word ‘woman’ is concerned with whether a particular social category around the term exists at all. I imagine many social constructivists about womanhood would be happy to grant Byrne’s definition of ‘WOMAN’ because they understand that the question of who belongs in ‘WOMAN+’ is what is much more relevant to contemporary feminist debates.

Implications for the Gender Critical Movement

Byrne’s analysis, even if it becomes widely accepted, fails to provide a resolution to contemporary feminist debates about whether trans women ought to be referred to as women, ought to have access to female-only spaces, and so forth. By acknowledging the existence of WOMAN+, and by acknowledging that non-female people may exist in WOMAN+, Byrne leaves answers to the aforementioned questions unresolved.

Does that mean all hope is lost for the gender-critical movement? No. While many people assume social constructivist views of gender automatically imply trans inclusion, there are many social constructivist models that still capture the traditional gender-critical position. Gender-critical philosophers may still argue (for instance) that existence in the category WOMAN+ is dependent on a particular set of life experiences that trans women do not have. Male people with CAS may exist in WOMAN+ because they have, from birth, experienced the same sets of oppressive experiences female people have experienced. If this is not true for trans women, they may not exist in WOMAN+ and there may be no similar obligation to allow them into female-only spaces, to call them by she/her pronouns, etc.

This line of argument may prove to be far more fruitful for the gender-critical movement. Moreover, it preserves the traditional feminist social constructionist approach to understanding womanhood. By contrast, abandoning the social constructivist model of womanhood in favor of a biological one is likely a dead end for feminists hoping to use philosophical argument to preserve female-only spaces.