This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warerton.

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www dot philosophy bites dot com what is a woman? Is a woman simply an adult female human or should we move away

from biological definitions and think of being a woman as socially and perhaps even subjectively defined, defined

by how people feel. What does that mean for transgender people? The philosopher Kathleen Stock has thought hard about these issues which have become particularly contentious in the last few years.

Kathleen Stock, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hi. The topic we're talking about today is what is a woman? Sounds an easy enough question. What is a woman?

Well, I can tell you what I think a woman is, but perhaps I better tell you what the available alternatives are first.

On one view, one with the most historical longevity, a woman is an adult human female person.

And that's I think still what the word woman refers to for most people

and obviously in other languages there's equivalent words that we can find pretty easily.

So in that sense it's a person who has a certain biological sex and is an adult and is a human.

But there are other options too so according to some feminist theorists a woman is to be defined

in terms of a certain kind of social role, meaning think of the

social stereotypes attached to being female, certain kind of expectations, about behavior, about

mental characteristics, about bodies, now take that

set of social stereotypes and that set of behaviors and

characteristics. A woman is somebody to whom those stereotypes and that role applies.

And a man, correspondingly, is somebody who inhabits the associated masculine role, set of stereotypes associated with maleness.

If it was defined by role then presumably it could change with time as roles shifted?

Yes, absolutely, and on one particular variant of this view, which is that Sally Haslanger,

she thinks that we should change our concept of womanhood.

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