The argument ‘from continuity’ is interesting and original. It establishes a necessary condition of being a woman but is not a logically complete account of the meaning of the word ‘woman’. It raises the question of “what is a girl” and the identification/recognition of sex is inescapable somewhere along the line (typically at the beginning of the process of social integration). By sex I mean the kind of body capable of fulfilling the binary biological function of producing male or female gametes and for successful procreation at some point in life; this definition allows for dysfunctional exceptions that may or may not approximate one side of the sexual function better than the other. Either way, ‘a girl’ is recognised as such on that basis, and this is what we generally mean by the word. Another way we can approach this problem is to take gender as a property of language and sex as a property of bodies. We can thus describe humans of a particular sex and stage of sexual maturity with human-specific gendered language; ’female’ is a more general term than ‘woman/girl’ insofar as it applies to all sexed species.
The argument ‘from continuity’ is interesting and original. It establishes a necessary condition of being a woman but is not a logically complete account of the meaning of the word ‘woman’. It raises the question of “what is a girl” and the identification/recognition of sex is inescapable somewhere along the line (typically at the beginning of the process of social integration). By sex I mean the kind of body capable of fulfilling the binary biological function of producing male or female gametes and for successful procreation at some point in life; this definition allows for dysfunctional exceptions that may or may not approximate one side of the sexual function better than the other. Either way, ‘a girl’ is recognised as such on that basis, and this is what we generally mean by the word. Another way we can approach this problem is to take gender as a property of language and sex as a property of bodies. We can thus describe humans of a particular sex and stage of sexual maturity with human-specific gendered language; ’female’ is a more general term than ‘woman/girl’ insofar as it applies to all sexed species.