starting to draft reply to Unit of Caring

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+Title: Reply to <em>The Unit of Caring</em> on Adult Human Females
+Date: 2018-03-26 18:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: epistemology, sex differences, The Unit of Caring
+
+The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog [_The Unit of Caring_](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com) [responds to](TODO: linky) an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word _woman_ as "adult human biological female":
+
+> Oh, yeah, sorry, I've heard that one too though I've yet to find anyone willing to justify it. If you can find anyone explaining why this is a good definition, or even explaining what good properties it has, I'd appreciate it[.]
+
+I'm happy to try to help if I can!
+
+I would say that a notable good property of the "adult human female" definition is _non-circularity_: we can articulate membership tests that do a pretty good job of narrowing down which entities _do_ and _do not_ belong to the category we're trying to talk about, _without_ appealing to the category itself. Does the person have a vagina, ovaries, breasts, and two X chromosomes? That's a woman. Has the person given birth? _Definitely_ a woman. Does the person have a penis? Definitely _not_ a woman. This at least gives us a starting point from which we can begin to use this _woman_ concept to make sense of the world, even if it's not immediately clear whether and how we should apply it to various comparatively rare edge cases. (What about female-to-male transsexuals? What about people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? _&c._)
+
+In contrast, gender-identity-based definitions don't have this useful non-circularity property. If all I know about _women_ is that women are defined as people who identify as women, I can't _use_ that definition to figure out which people are women and what probabilistic predictions I should make about them. This point may be more apparent if you substitute some completely foreign concept for _women_. If someone told you that zorplebobben are people who identify as zorplebobben, you would probably have questions about what that means! _Why_ do they identify as zorplebobben? _Given_ that someone is a zorplebobben, what _else_ should I infer about them? The self-identity definition doesn't help: without a base case, the infinite recursion of (people who identify as (people who identify as (people who identify as ...))) never terminates.
+
+Of course, people who believe in gender identity don't