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.
> 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."
> Things aren’t as clean cut as you desire them to be.
Things are exactly how they are, wishing for human nature to be different is a pointless enterprise that I try my best to avoid.
> I don’t know how rare you think this stuff is but I’m fairly confident it isn’t that rare.
Luckily, a simple Internet search can settle the question for you!
> Why do you care so much about gender?
I don't care much about gender, it's just a grammatical concept (honestly, less interesting than verb tenses or noun declensions). I care a lot about sex, because it's intimately linked to reproduction, which is the strongest human instinct, without it human life would not exist. Kind of like how people care about "food" and "water".
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.
>It's the developmental pathway for the female reproductive system.
That's pretty immediately a circular dependency though? The more important question is why anyone should take your reasoning over any other about what "Man" and "Woman" mean.
Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
> That's pretty immediately a circular dependency though?
By the female reproductive system, I meant the type that produces large gametes, and so on. Versus the male one that produces small gametes.
> Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?