The problem is that it actually is hard to define. If you’re a normal human being you won’t do dna tests or inspect people’s genitals or whatever to decide how to carry out your social interactions (and maybe you shouldn’t care anyway). You’ll probably end up with some combination of memory, guessing based on name, and ‘looks like a woman’. If you’re a state and are trying to make these classifications in law you’ll find it’s actually fraught with difficulties. This isn’t some modern problem with transgender people; there are plenty of people for whom biological sex is hard to categorise too, eg various kinds of intersex people, or those with unusual chromosomes or gene expression. Historic solutions would look like:
- apply social ostracism
- give some combination of legal rights of men and women
- go with however the person presents (and possibly avoid talking about it/have the person avoid the risk of confrontation about the matter)
- don’t define man or woman in the law and let the judges/people figure it out if need be
Maybe the problem is that the thing that tends to matter really is the social construct and not something that can be easily measured if only you had the right instrument. And then perhaps the issue is that legal definitions tend not to be as rigid as those used in, say, mathematics.
Another fun question to try to answer is what the definition of a person’s name is or should be. In my country there isn’t really such a thing as one’s legal name and the state/courts will go for a name you use for yourself or a name people know you as. But it’s still possible in society to get someone’s name wrong or to see cruel nicknames in the playground.
It’s very easy if you ignore the edge cases. Adult human female. Otherwise it’s like saying you can’t define “sandwich” because hotdogs exist. Almost any noun is like this
