What makes a woman?

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I thought this article made some good points:

I think if you feel like a woman inside you're a woman.

You determine your gender from your reproductive system and as for way of thinking males and females do have different brain structures

Huh? If men and women have different brain structures, then surely *that* is where gender is located, rather than the reproductive system. People, after all, have an innate sense of their gender that doesn't require them to check their genitals - a man who loses his penis and testicles will still consider himself a man, he won't change his identity because he no longer has male reproductive organs.

Can we just rationalist taboo the word gender?

It seems to be pretty clear now that there are actual differences between male and female brains, despite what the gender-is-a-social-construct crowd want to believe.

As regards the question in the OP, the straight dictionary definition is an adult human female. So the best question to ask then is, what makes a person female? Or, what aspects of being female - neurological, genetic, anatomical, gonadal - are most important in order for an individual to be a woman? It's not a controversial position to take that there are multiple aspects to sex, not just the genitals (as the TERFs like to reduce women to) or the chromosomes (as the religion right like to reduce women to); this is accepted by most biologists.

As far as society goes... since it is composed of relations between persons, and since personhood is (as far as we can tell) located in the brain, it makes sense to consider someone sociallly a woman based on (1) how they present, and (2) their neuro-psychological sex. Of course, since we are incapable of mind melds, you'll just have to take people's word on what they say their psychological gender is.

I still think this belongs in PPR.

Also, what is it with these... people... who define woman based on the way they're treated by society? For one, not all cisgendered women will have such experiences - by excluding them, they are trampling on other women's identities. For two, the very world they claim to want would not treat women in such a way, and therefore would not - by their claims - have any actual women in it.

Are they that self-deluded that they cannot see the innate stupidity of their own position?

Oh come on. The steady drip-drip of privilege? I really don't think humans are somehow different to all other animals when it comes to gendered brains. Or are you seriously claiming that mice and macaques have systems of privilege that not only ensure the males and females behave differently, but are intelligent enough that the ones whose hormones were altered in development will pick up on the cues that tell them to behave as the opposite sex?

Face it - humans are not tabula rasa's when it comes to gender. We don't come out of the womb with identitical brains, which are then altered steadily by the way we're treated, and in remarkably consistent ways. Any theory of gendered socialisation being the cause is a Greenfieldism - I point to x, I point to y, that is all. I point to gendered socialisation, I point to changes in the brain, that is all. We already did the (unethical) experiments on this (see: David Reimer), and the findings do not agree with the tabula rasa idea. The idea of tabula rasa when it comes to gender currently belongs in the not even wrong category, and will remain there for the forseeable future.

As regards privilege, it strips womanhood from women who had the exact upbringing a lot of feminists claim they want, because they haven't been exposed to the "patriarchy". What nonsense is this?

Sorry it wasn't clear, maybe this is clearer:
What I meant: if someone for example had a male reproductive system even if it was lost or something, originally having a male reproductive system indicates that your whole body structure is male so your brain structure would be as well

That would be the case - if human development worked perfectly every time. But it doesn't.

Not having a penis attached would be my first thought.

Huh? "Man is that which has a penis, woman is that which is not man"?

Born with a female brain
born with a female body (body and brain probably being the same thing when you get down to it)

Pretty simple.

People were not offended because Lawrence Summers said women and men had different brains, there is nothing offensive about that. People were offended because he said women's brains were less good at science.