Woman = gender = a social construction relating to behaviours and attributes based on labels of masculinity and femininity.
An effeminate gay man has the behaviours and attributes of femininity -> an effeminate gay man is a woman.
It doesn't work that way in practice, though. Unlike sex, gender is a continuum, but the two are closely related. In practice, very few people are getting their Sex Gender Combination mistaken. A transsexual male performing womanhood as a cultural construct is usually easy to distinguish from an effeminate gay man. But while this is easy enough to do in practice, codifying it into a formal definition with rigid boundaries is pretty much impossible.
What's interesting to me about LondonJohn's definition is that it's the definition used by the UK Office for National Statistics (technically they're just using the UK government's definition, which makes sense).
This has implications for how the UK will be measuring and reporting certain statistics. When the government wishes to enact a policy, or measure the results of a policy, these are the definitions the Stats office will be using to report on the relevant questions.
For example: "How many women in the UK are entering the STEM workforce?"
How will the Stats office determine who's a woman?
- A statistical sampling of people in STEM, against a rubric or checklist of cultural touch-points? That seems expensive and contentious, and very difficult to get consistent statistical results over many surveys.
- A statistical sampling of people in STEM, based purely on self-reporting? Much simpler and arguably more humane.
- Defer to other sources? For example, asking employers and schools how many people they have in STEM, based entirely on the respondents' own record-keeping of gender among their own staff and students.
Then there's the matter of whether this question is really the right question, and whether the resulting statistics are misleading. If a male transitions and then gets a STEM job, is that really progress towards "more women in STEM"?
We're already seeing similar problems of ambiguity and misleading results, from statistics about women and violent crime.
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As an aside, I think it's kind of silly to link to the Stats office definition, rather than to a primary source.
The Stats office simply references the UK government's definition.
Presumably if we track down the UK government's definition, it would reference the UK department of health or some such.
And if we tracked that down, we'd probably find the definition preferred by some established and reputable medical authority.
I'm happy to accept the Stats office definition provisionally as LondonJohn's definition. I think it would be better if he were to track it down to it's originating authority, and cite that instead.
And of course I think it would best if he just gave his own definition in his own words, with a citation back to the sources of his reasoning. But it's a very long thread, and it's quite possible that he's already done so. I welcome correction on this point if it's happened already and I just missed it.
EC said there were no chaperons. I assumed she meant they went by themselves.
