As a biological species, "human," of course, must include female. Any biological definition would have to mention menstruation and freedom from estrus as defining characteristics of the human animal. Gwyneth Jones slyly alludes to this when a character in her novel, Phoenix Cafe, explains why gender is a killing issue (and has, indeed, in the world of the novel been the grounds upon which "millions upon millions of innocent women and girl children and girl fetuses had been killed"): "Females don't need males. Except for intromission, to get pregnant, and we don't need that anymore. Males need females desperately, because otherwise they have no offspring. Males are supposed to have invented our arts and sciences, you know, as toys to attract the females. But women hijacked the famous male creativity when they walked out on patriarchy. Then they didn't need men for anything." Somewhere in the book a character (one of the aliens, known as "Aleutians," defines real humans as females, on the assumption that men are not really human, since they just get in the way of the business of life.


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