A common paraphrase of H.L. Mencken says: “For every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple – and wrong.” These days we see how helpful that quote is, when it is applied to the question “What is a woman?”

The OED’s first definition of “woman” is “an adult female human being”. Webster says “an adult female person”. It has become a commonplace on the right, of late, to feel so very clever by defining “woman” as “adult human female” – roughly but not exactly following the dictionary definitions – and then watch others struggle to provide their own definition. UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull put up billboards proclaiming as much; director Matt Walsh even made a whole movie with this definition as its thesis. The intended point of this exercise, of course, is to say that transgender women are not really women and that presumably this should be obvious. And while I do think it can reasonably be debated whether trans women are women, this particular piece of rhetoric does far more to illustrate foolishness on the anti-trans side than the pro-trans side.