Citizenship is a political category, not a biological one. Citizenship doesn’t describe a person’s intrinsic characteristics; it defines her relationship to a nation’s government, to the other people who are citizens, and to noncitizens. Whether someone qualifies as a citizen isn’t inscribed in her body; citizenship is determined by the requirements set forth in the country’s constitution. Even if the constitution stated that only people of a certain height qualified for citizenship, we would still understand it as a political category, a relationship among people that has to do with governing
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