A few things I should probably say before all of this. I am not trans. I am not pro-trans (I am not anti-trans). My own son has no siblings other than a sister, and for a long time, he wanted to (and often did) wear her clothes. He is a kid, and all kids love flowers (anything in nature, really), bright colors, and rainbows of course. But even I have actively discouraged my son from wearing girl clothing.

Why? In no uncertain terms, I have warned my kindergarten son that in all likelihood, he will be mocked and ostracized for wearing girl clothing (as he has in fact since been). He doesn't seem to want the whole "girl" fashion thing, whatever that signifies to him, more than he wants to fit in, so he has opted for dressing as a boy. Now my son goes around telling people, what is or is not "only for boys" and where "girls are not allowed." The boundaries I enforced for him are now his to bludgeon others with.

Do I feel bad that I enforced gender boundaries for the patriarchy? Not really, if only because girl clothing is objectively and undeniably better, more fun, more interesting, etc. than boy clothing, so it never came as a surprise to me that my son would want to wear girl's clothing. I did not immediately assume that my son actually wanted to be a girl, simply because he wanted to wear girls' clothes. Men's fashion has come a long way, it has not come far enough, and in the future I intend to advocate in for greater equity in fashion options.

Boys clothes should come in bright colors, including rainbows. If you feel threatened by the fact that all children love rainbows, consider the fact that rainbows happen because each raindrop is like a tiny prism, and the divine light of God himself, when it moves through a prism, splays out into a spectrum of colors (indigo too, if you can see it), and it's fucking beautiful. It is spectacular, literally. Why you would not accept rainbows as universal, let alone masculine, is beyond me. I have trouble thinking of anything more masculine than divine light penetrating divine water, and giving birth to every conceivable color.

So let's begin the real conversation now that the foregoing has been said. Now that it is on the table, so to speak, and we are all looking at the situation with charitable eyes (and I do beg for charity): What is a woman, anyway? Of course, this question is "retarded" as the mean kids used to say back in my day. I mean that just as they meant it, except not to be mean, but simply to be factual. You must lack all common sense, in other words, you have to be an imbecile, not to know what a woman is, right? And in an important sense, that clearly is true. Only an imbecile would not know what a woman is.

Rarely are the people who "just get it" on their back foot, however. The mainstream gets to interrogate the "libtards" or "wokesters," as they call us. They shout at us through the television, at congressional hearings and news interviews, "What is a woman?" Nobody knows how to answer this question, which only proves that liberals are imbeciles, right? Except that, when you're a trained philosopher like I am, you already know that defining anything at all turns out to be really complicated. Brilliant people have written books for millennia, which do nothing but try to identify basic concepts like, "Being, identity, Truth, or Good. It is not easy to define anything, and much less so for social concepts like gender.

As a trained philosopher, I am more than happy to venture a definition of "Woman," for those who may be interested in good faith: A woman is a person who is readily identified by members of her society as belonging to the female sex, via characteristically feminine traits, fashions, and mannerisms. This definition includes trans women, so long as they pass. Genitals and DNA are biological concepts, not social concepts, and even biologists will tell you that gender is a social concept, which maps imperfectly onto biology.

In the tradition of Wittgenstein, I think the best way to understand the meaning of a concept is to look at how it operates in the real world, how it plays out in a "language game." Our minds automatically gender the people whom we see. It takes a split second. It has nothing to do with genitals and DNA. I have not seen the genitals of 99.999999999999999999999% of all of the people whom I have notheless gendered, thank goodness (genitals are not particularly attractive to look at, and I would rather not see them). And yet, I have no problem assigning gender.

It is a good thing that we do not need to understand concepts in order to use them. Or we would have to do a genital check on every person we met in order to know if they're men or women.