Male or Female?

    This blog post is a response to the question: If a human being is male in one respect (chromosomally, say) and female in another (perhaps morphologically), ought we to count them as male or female? Why? Which sex sub-categories should be the arbiters of cases like this? 

     The most important thing to consider when answering this question is that I am not a biologist, doctor, geneticist, or any other sort of expert in sex in human beings. So remove all of the salt from all of the world's oceans and take my answer with it.

       If a person was in one respect a male and in one respect another, then I think we ought to count them as just that, rather than place them into either the category of male or the category of female. It is either this, or, despite their apparent sexual ambiguity, they meet the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a female or male. But if the latter option is taken into account when classifying them by sex another question emerges: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a female/male? I do not know the answer to this, but it is conceivable to me that there is one. The dictionary defines male as an adjective meaning "of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring," and female as "of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes."  Given these definitions, which to me seem prima facie fair, I would classify our hypothetical person in accordance with the gametes that they produce. But even these definitions create a grey area for certain people, such as those who have since birth been incapable of producing gametes. How can such people be of either sex, if the sexual category a person falls into is dependent upon which gametes they produce? They are not of the group that produces sperm, or of the group that produces eggs, so how should we then identify them? There are a few options. We could analyze other shared biological characteristics in males and females respectively, and compare them to the biological characteristics of our hypothetical person and make our judgement based on which sex they share these characteristics with, or we could put them in a separate category altogether.

    I do not know which of these options is better, because the answer to that depends on what one means by better. If we are considering real people in our modern world I would say the former is better, and more pragmatic. If a male was incapable of producing sperm since birth, but by every other sex characteristic was a male, their life would not operate at a fundamentally different level than an otherwise identical male who could produce sperm. Their ability (or rather lack thereof)  to produce sperm would not manifest itself in their life at all unless they wanted to procreate. And in our modern world the ability to procreate is not even a necessary condition to be a parent.

The latter is better because it is, in a way, more accurate. It is a stipulative approach with strict criteria for each category, there is no ambiguity as to which of the three categories someone belongs to. There are no ambiguous cases, the three categories cover all possible situations a person could be in. From a certain biological perspective it also seems to make more sense. In order to procreate a female has to mate with a male, if there are members of the species who cannot procreate with males or females, then they are irrelevant in terms of propagating the species. Thankfully for humans though, an individual's relevance to society is entirely removed from whether or not they can procreate, so under this classification system sex is essentially irrelevant. Perhaps we should rename the third, or all three categories, so a non-trivial percent of the population is not made to feel like an other. Leave your suggestions for non-hierarchical names for the three categories in the comments.

    In conclusion the answer to the initial question depends on how one defines male and female respectively. More importantly though, we should consider them as an individual first, rather than male or female.