[feltmann]

They were satirising USA Today honoring him with a 'Woman Of The Year' award.

It was rather on point:

> Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman.

Just highlights how absurd it is for him to be receiving accolades that should be reserved for women, doesn't it.

[mrguyorama]

>Just highlights how absurd it is for him to be receiving accolades that should be reserved for women, doesn't it.

So your assertion is that they aren't a woman because they were born with a penis? What is a woman then?

[feltmann]

An adult female human, of course.

[mrguyorama]

What defines a female human?

[Georgelemental]

A female is a living organism possessing (or having once possessed, if they were removed or destroyed through illness or injury) sexual organs designed to produce ova. A human is a member of the genus homo.

[mrguyorama]

So what sex/gender are people born without reproductive organs?

Also, what does it mean for an organ to be "designed" to do something? Who or what is the designer?

[Georgelemental]

> So what sex/gender are people born without reproductive organs?

Yes, biology is complicated, and a small fraction of a percent of humans are born with genitalia that are either absent/nearly absent or very close to midway between male and female. (Most people considered "intersex" are still pretty clearly male or female, and often genitalia that look ambiguous at birth will become less so as a person matures). In these rare cases, sex determination can be genuinely difficult/somewhat arbitrary (and I don't claim to be an expert).

However, even in the ambiguous cases there are often factors that can favor one or another determination. In humans, sex develops as a response to various hormones. Everyone has at least one X chromosome which on its own induces the production of hormones/signaling factors leading to the development of female sexual organs secondary sexual characteristics. In people with a Y chromosome in addition to the X, that behavior is overridden by genes on Y to instead produce male genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. In some intersex people, the genitalia are ambiguous but the presence or absence of Y chromosome expression still e

affects secondary sexual characteristics to an extent that one sex assignation makes somewhat more sense than the other.

But in any case, the extremely rare exceptions don't invalidate the general rule of human sex.

As for gender, that's a purely grammatical concept. Nouns and pronouns can have gender, people don't. Or at least that was the original meaning of the word, before pedophile John Money appropriated it in the 1950s. A pre-50s Google Books search may surprise you: https://www.google.com/search?q=gender&sca_esv=562865996&tbs...

> Who or what is the designer?

The blind process of natural selection. Perhaps the word choice of "designed" wasn't the most correct, but it's shorter than "most similar to a structure that would allow it to do the thing."

[feltmann]

A person who developed along the ovarian pathway (rather than testes pathway) when an embryo.

Female humans have this in common with other female mammals, and a wide variety of other species too. The gonochoric ones anyway.

[mrguyorama]

>A person who developed along the ovarian pathway

What is the ovarian pathway? Is it merely the existence of ovaries?

[feltmann]

It's the developmental pathway for the female reproductive system. My wording was chosen carefully to avoid the usual nitpicking that happens in these sort of discussions, e.g. what if the ovaries have since been removed, what if the ovaries are functionally impaired, etc.