Originally posted by Leonhard
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I do not at all agree with this next claim though:
Note the above definition also accept members who have broken functionality. Are impotent, or infertile. A historical accident preventing the function is not the same as not possessing the potential for it, even if it isn't actualised. A blind person still could see, in principle, he just can't if something has occurred that prevents the functioning of his eyes.
If you define sex as "functionally male" or "functionally female" then it is totally ad hoc to say "well the group of people who aren't functional can be shoved into those categories too, because." That defeats the whole notion of using functionality as a defining factor in the first place.
I do see quite a strong match between your definition and typical perceptions in the ancient world though. For example, a man who looked fully male, but who couldn't functionally impregnate a woman (e.g. inability to maintain an erection, lack of heterosexual desire etc) was regarded as being 3rd-gender ("eunuch") and not male.
I would have, myself, tended to give an exemplar-based definition of sex: Our culture understands a "typical male" to be someone with XY chromosomes, who has male primary and secondary sexual features (and similar for a typical female). Once you start getting deviations from that (chromosomal disorders, hormonal disorders, developmental disorders etc) and the resultant person differs from what our culture would label a typical male or a typical female, then people become increasingly confused as to what to label them because they are not a good match to the exemplars. I would say that in practice that is the working definition that most people in modern Western culture use.
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