Abstract

This paper develops a formal account of the concepts woman, sex, and gender. I argue that many difficulties in contemporary feminist philosophy arise from conflating three independent dimensions: reproductive type, expressive mode, and the normative process that enforces expectations based on perceived type. Once these are distinguished, the familiar puzzles dissolve. Sex is reproductive type, biologically fixed and defined by developmental organization toward gamete production. Expression is behavioral presentation, individually variable and socially legible. Gender is neither a property nor an identity but a process: the patterned application of normative expectations to persons on the basis of type. The structure of this process is invariant across cultures, though its content varies. I show that the most sophisticated ameliorative account of “woman” (Jenkins 2016) fails for six independent structural reasons, each stemming from a methodological substitution of construction for analysis. In contrast, the framework developed here provides coherent definitions, clarifies the status of trans identity, resolves the pronoun question, and grounds ethical distinctions between type-based and expression-based treatment—without requiring anyone to deny biological reality or disregard lived expression. The result is a clearer conceptual schema within which ongoing social and political debates can proceed more productively.