Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself,

associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay. You can support our podcast by visiting

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay.

What is this thing we call a woman?

The most obvious definition, an adult female human, is now considered by some to be a form of hate speech,

as it excludes those who are biologically male but self-identify otherwise.

London-based Colette contributor Helen Joyce has been writing a book about these issues,

and in so doing, she began collecting some of the many definitions of the word woman that activists and self-appointed gender experts have been circulating.

She described some of these in her recently published Colette article,

She Who Must Not Be Named.

And on Friday, she spoke to me over Skype to talk about them.

Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Helen, thanks for joining the Colette Podcast.

Thanks very much.

So this is a really interesting project and I guess finally you're going to discover what it means

to be a woman.

I know.

I mean amazing. Here I've been 51 years and I didn't know until it now.

...