I appreciate your input on exploring this topic. Your example looks like it could be moving toward a simple definition, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. Because we’re dealing with human beings, we’re also dealing with degrees of variance just as we would expect from any living organism. A procrustean definition that doesn’t account for real world variables puts us in a similar position as the astronomers who prescribed that planetary motion must be circular due to its perfect shape.

Already in the provided example definition there are the beginnings of knots to untangle since the conditions are compound — (XX chromosomes) and (female reproductive anatomy). Because of that “and,” it means that all conditions must be satisfied for the definition to apply. Here we come into conflict with some of the issues of variance. What about when only one condition is met? Our example definition can tell us that someone is “not a woman”…but that doesn’t feel very useful to organize the world into “woman” and “not a woman” buckets.

If we’re still satisfied with our definition and don’t want to change it, we could expand the number of categories so that instead of “woman” and “not a woman,” every combination of conditions receives its own label — perhaps by creating a table with reproductive anatomy on one axis being and chromosomes on the other axis. If you want to explore that path we can, but it feels overly complicated and impractical to me.

I think we need to keep working.