Being a woman isn't an essence, it's a material, provable fact. I'm not a female human being because society or history made me one, or because I picked the 'woman' category on some metaphysical spreadsheet. I'm a woman because I was born with the equipment to produce large gametes.
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the whole exchange on X is nonsensical, philosophically: the syntactically correct use of members of the lexicon, but, used together, semantically null.
the associated questions, in lingua, are interesting:
could i – a male – have been female?
and, more generally: is my (human) pedigree essential to me? (could i have been born to different parents?)
i am, of course, steering clear of the benighted question of “what does it mean to be a woman?”
>>the whole exchange on X is nonsensical, philosophically:<< That's right. It's depressingly nonsensical. Q1: Could I, a male, have been female? If I first came to be at conception, then, given that I am now male, I could not have been female. But if I did not first come to be at conception, but pre-existed my conception as a merely possible being (but not an existent), such that, at conception I merely acquired a material body, then it is conceivable that I, a male, could have been female. Early Russell made the being-existence distinction and lately it has been defended by Palle Yourgrau. Q2: Could I have been born of different parents? No. (Kripke, "essentiality of origin.")
personally, i believe that i am essentially a human male, which means that there is no possible world in which i am an rational whale, a stone, or an asexual QWZZAX, frolicking under the three suns of a gas-giant in a distant galaxy.
so, I agree with you on Q2.
your suggestion in your Q1 entails dualism, which i also reject. i’m not sure how it would be possible reasonably to motivate that particular flavor of the position.
>>i’m not sure how it would be possible reasonably to motivate that particular flavor of the position.<< Materials may be gleaned from Palle Yourgrau, Death and Nonexistence. He does not, however, address the specific suggestion I made, but do not endorse.