Remember those standardized tests where you practically got a few points just for following directions?Write your name in the correct box. Fill in
Remember those standardized tests where you practically got a few points just for following directions?
Write your name in the correct box. Fill in the bubble completely. Use a No. 2 pencil. Do not skip ahead.
Some questions felt so easy you wondered whether somebody was trying to trick you.
That is sometimes how I feel when I hear people ask, “What is a woman?”
I understand that human beings can have complicated lives, identities, personalities and experiences. Biology itself contains variations. Still, the basic biological answer is surprisingly straightforward.
A woman is an adult human female.
And female biology is much more interesting than one body part.
Sometimes I think we have talked about women’s bodies in the least interesting ways possible.
Too much judgment. Too much inspection. Too much obsession with appearance. Too many conversations about whether we are thin enough, young enough, pretty enough, fertile enough, agreeable enough.
Meanwhile, the female body has been over here doing astonishing things.
A woman is an adult human female, and female biology extends far beyond genitalia. It reaches into our bones, blood, brains, immune systems, hearts, hormones and cells.
So today, women get the good seat.
Here are twelve things worth knowing about us.
1. A Female Baby Is Born With an Enormous Supply of Immature Eggs
Before a girl ever takes her first breath, her ovaries have already been extraordinarily busy.
During fetal development, the number of immature germ cells in the ovaries rises into the millions. By birth, roughly one to two million immature eggs may remain, and by puberty the number has fallen substantially.
Only a small fraction will ever be ovulated.
Imagine beginning life carrying cells connected to reproductive possibilities decades into the future.
The female story started long before anybody handed that little girl her first doll.
2. The Clitoris Has Thousands of Nerve Fibers
For generations, women’s sexual anatomy was poorly described, minimized and sometimes simply omitted from serious discussion.
Yet the clitoris is a remarkable sensory organ. Modern anatomical research has shown that its visible portion is only a small part of a much larger internal structure, and research using modern counting techniques has estimated more than 10,000 nerve fibers in the human dorsal clitoral nerves.
Women’s bodies were never boring.
Sometimes the textbooks were.
3. The Uterus Can Expand Dramatically During Pregnancy
Before pregnancy, the uterus is a relatively small muscular organ.
Then pregnancy asks something astonishing of it.
Over roughly nine months, it enlarges enormously to accommodate a developing baby, placenta and amniotic fluid. Its muscular wall stretches while maintaining the strength eventually required for labor.
After birth, it begins contracting and shrinking toward its pre-pregnancy size through a process called involution.
That is not merely a container.
That is living muscle performing an extraordinary biological transformation.
4. Pregnancy Can Increase a Woman’s Blood Volume Enormously
A pregnant woman’s cardiovascular system doesn’t simply continue business as usual.
Her blood volume increases substantially, commonly by roughly 40 to 50 percent over the course of pregnancy. Her heart must pump more blood as her body supports her own tissues, the placenta and a developing baby.
Her cardiovascular system adapts to an entirely new workload.
There is a reason pregnancy deserves to be understood as major physiology rather than something women’s bodies casually do on the side.
5. A Woman Can Carry Cells From Her Child for Decades
This one sounds like poetry, but it is biology.
During pregnancy, cells can cross the placenta in both directions. Some fetal cells enter the mother’s body and can persist there long after pregnancy ends.
Scientists call this fetal microchimerism.
Researchers have detected cells originating from offspring in maternal tissues decades later. Scientists are still investigating what these cells do and whether they can sometimes be helpful, harmful or simply biological passengers.
A pregnancy can leave cellular traces long after the child who once lived beneath her heart is grown.
That one deserves a moment.
6. Women’s Immune Systems Can Be Fierce
Females generally mount stronger immune responses than males.
That can mean stronger responses to some infections and vaccines. There is a cost to having such a reactive defense system, however. Females are also disproportionately affected by many autoimmune diseases, conditions in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues.
So when scientists investigate diseases such as lupus, Sjögren’s syndrome and multiple sclerosis, sex cannot simply be treated as an irrelevant detail.
Women’s immune systems have their own complicated story.
7. Female Bones Are Living Tissue With a Hormonal Story
We tend to picture skeletons as the scaffolding underneath us, finished and permanent.
They aren’t.
Bone is living tissue that is continually being broken down and rebuilt. Estrogen helps regulate that process. When estrogen levels decline sharply around menopause, bone loss can accelerate, contributing to women’s increased risk of osteoporosis later in life.
Your skeleton has been responding to the seasons of your life right along with you.
8. The Female Body Can Build an Entire Temporary Organ
The placenta deserves far more awe than it gets.
During pregnancy, a new organ develops that helps exchange oxygen, nutrients and waste products between mother and fetus. It also produces hormones and participates in complex immune and metabolic processes that help sustain pregnancy.
Then, after completing its work, it leaves the body after birth.
The female reproductive system can participate in growing an organ for a particular biological mission and then release it when that mission is complete.
Excuse me?
We should be talking about this more.
9. Breast Milk Changes
Human milk is not simply one fixed recipe pouring from the body.
Its composition changes over the course of lactation. Colostrum, the early milk produced around birth, differs from mature milk. Milk composition can also change during a feeding and across stages of infant development.
It contains nutrients alongside antibodies and numerous other biologically active components.
The female body is not merely producing food.
It is producing a complex biological fluid connected to nourishment and immune protection.
10. Female Biology Reaches the Brain, Too
The brain belongs to the body.
Sex-related hormones and developmental processes influence the nervous system, and researchers study sex differences in brain development, neurological disease, pain, cognition and responses to hormones.
Individual women vary enormously, so there is no personality, talent, hobby or temperament that serves as a test of femaleness.
Women can be mathematicians, dancers, mechanics, mothers, boxers, engineers, artists, soldiers, introverts, daredevils and homebodies.
Female biology gives women bodies.
It does not hand us scripts.
11. Menopause Is an Extraordinary Biological Transition, Not Womanhood Expiring
A woman can spend decades menstruating and then enter an entirely different physiological era.
As ovarian function changes and estrogen levels decline, effects can appear throughout the body, including the reproductive system, bones, blood vessels, skin, sleep regulation and brain.
Yet menopause is still astonishingly under-discussed considering how many human beings experience it.
A woman can live decades beyond her final menstrual period.
Her reproductive years ended.
She certainly did not.
12. Scientists Are Still Discovering How Deeply Sex Affects Human Health
This may be the fact that fascinates me most.
For too long, medical research frequently treated male bodies as the default. Women were historically underrepresented or excluded from important areas of clinical research, and researchers increasingly recognize that findings from one sex cannot always simply be assumed to apply identically to the other.
Scientists now investigate sex differences in cardiovascular disease, immunity, pain, drug responses, metabolism, neurological disease and much more.
Which means we still have questions to ask.
Wonderful questions.
What haven’t we noticed yet?
What did generations of women experience that medicine dismissed as insignificant?
What treatments might work differently in female bodies?
What have women’s bodies been trying to tell us while nobody bothered to study them closely enough?
I want more of those questions.
Because women have spent enough centuries being looked at without necessarily being seen.
Look beyond the face.
Beyond the breasts.
Beyond the uterus.
Beyond the genitalia.
There are bones rebuilding themselves, immune cells standing guard, hormones carrying messages, neurons firing, blood circulating, muscles adapting and cells carrying an ancient biological inheritance forward.
Girls deserve to grow up learning this.
Women deserve to grow old knowing it.
The female body is not interesting because of how pleasing somebody else finds it.
It was extraordinary before anybody looked.
Females are amazing.
What is a woman?
An adult human female.
The fascinating part begins after we fill in that bubble.
Because then we get to ask what being female actually means biologically, and suddenly we are talking about chromosomes, gametes, hormones, reproductive organs, cells, bones, muscles, fat, immunity, metabolism, the brain, aging and the astonishing developmental journey of the female human body.
Women are not merely a collection of reproductive parts.
We are whole miraculous organisms. Female human beings.
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