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Every time I ask a prog in the wild what the word "woman" means they either define it as itself and pretend they don't know what circular logic is, or act like it's a ridiculous gotcha question nobody could possibly answer. It's an incoherent nonsense ideology.
Oh come on, surely you understand the game being played here.
There are many different things that we call 'definitions' of words, including intensional vs extensional definitions, ostensive vs. stipulative vs. analytical definitions, etc.
The 'what is a woman' meme is just a trick of equivocating between different types of definitions (usually ostensive and analytical), and then dismissing any explanations that try to take the time to explain this distinction as 'mental gymnastics'.
Most people without training in logic or linguistics are most familiar with ostensive definitions, like 'a bird is a small flying animal with wings and feathers' or 'a woman is an adult human female'. These are the natural 'definitions' that occur to them intuitively, it takes a lot of prompting for them to reach for something beyond that. But turning around and pretending that what they just gave is an analytical definition - ie, that penguins must not be birds and trans women must not be women, therefore - is just a dishonest rhetorical trick.
And, either way - the whole thing is just a semantic argument about the meanings of words, to begin with. Semantic arguments are a good way to waste time arguing about nothing, and can often make your opponents look dumb if you strictly control what your audience is allowed to see. But it doesn't actually mean anything substantive about the empirical reality of the question at hand.
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