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The role of coffee in social interactions
Different types of coffee and their preparation
The impact of coffee on society and economy
Like other animals that give birth to live young, female humans also provide their developing baby a safe space in which to grow during gestation.
To describe as “female” a ewe that (just like a woman) has ovaries, a uterus and a vagina, who (just like a woman) produces eggs and gives birth does not attract handwringing analysis of what “ewe” means and whether some rams might be counted as one.
It is a peculiarly human and almost religious practice to distinguish our own species from the rest of the animal kingdom, in this case with regards to sex.
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
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These all strike me as different ways of responding to the coerciveness of our current gender order. While the ones that involve changing one’s gender or transforming one’s body throw up sometimes taxing problems regarding access to women-only services or how much prior counselling is appropriate...
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I am a lawyer, and in law there are two sorts of woman: a person who was born a woman and has not transitioned to become a man under the Gender Recognition Act 2004; and a person who was born a man and has transitioned to become a woman under the same Act.
But in practice there are people ...
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I believe that what defines a woman is her biological sex.
The binary biological categories of male and female are a material reality even if there are variations of sexual development in-between.
Throughout the world and throughout history, women have been and are subject to system...
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We know it means something different for Caitlyn Jenner, Kimberlé Crenshaw, JK Rowling, Cara Delevingne, James Charles, Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Lia Thomas, the Queen, Malala Yousafzai, an incel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Miriam Margolyes, or a man who buys a “non-bio woman” (an AI-enhanced sex doll wh...
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A woman is someone who identifies as an adult female human being. The word is in flux so no wonder politicians, who want to be all things to all people, find it so tricky to define.
Usually language evolves gradually. But “woman” is changing fast, helped by social media, meaning we can wat...
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First, get the science right. Most born women have XX chromosomes, men XY. Intersex individuals can have other combinations.
In the US, it is estimated that 1.4m people—or around 0.6 per cent of the population—want to change in social role from male to female or from female to male, though...
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To those who argue that sex is not a biological but a cultural and social construct, I would say that this cannot wholly explain why women and girls are the targets of many forms of harm throughout their lives: female foeticide (sex-selective abortion), female infanticide, FGM and reproductive co...
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Is being a woman a matter of biology, a product of an inner identity—or something in-between?
A range of women, including a former Supreme Court judge, a biologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and a feminist campaigner give us their verdicts.
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What is a woman? What makes someone a woman? I should know. Shouldn’t I? I’m a cisgender, straight woman.
My birth certificate says “female.” Is that what makes me a woman? No, it’s not that simple. A six-letter word—female—on a birth certificate or any other official document does not alw...
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For the most part, social and political institutions divide their populations into females and males. I easily fall into the female category in this gender binary system. Yet this system is not universal. There are many other ways we humans have organised genders; both in the past and present, th...
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Babies are identified as male or female on the basis of their genitals—though in a small number of cases the observations are inconclusive—and are then set off on the long process of acculturation into their assigned categories, learning the appropriate ways of holding their bodies, engaging in t...
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It is uncontroversial to name an adult female sheep a “ewe” or to know that our scrambled eggs come from “hens.”
Humans have long used nouns that denote individual animals by their species and sex (and often stage of maturity), including in relation to our own species: a “woman” is an adul...
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In most cases, the question that troubles people is not what is a woman, but what is a “real” woman. "Real” women are defined very differently in different periods and places.
It is one of the paradoxes of gender that we are so often told it is in our nature to be women, as if biology is i...
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