Ok so I seem to have some friends (who I thought had more brains but hey ho) who believe that because Alice Roberts says there's more than two sexes it must be true.
Anyway - I'm happy with the definition of your sex being to do with your reproductive class...but I can see a glaring hole in that one that she will find and I don't know an answer that will work....
If you are a woman because you are of the class of people who produce large, stationary gametes, how do you know you are a member of that class if you don't produce them (ie are infertile)? Why doesn't your class change (if we use that definition) if you have your ovaries removed?
How do you then say that "you are still a member of that class even though your biology is broken" without opening that up to men saying that they are actually a member of that class just with more badly broken biology?
(And no, I'm not saying infertile women aren't women - I'm preparing an answer to the argument).
My worry with this is that you are a member of that class because either it's blindingly obvious in the same way as the fact you are human is blindingly obvious - or we are back to a woman is someone without a Y chromosome (Do I mean a working SRY region on the Y chromosome here?) - at which point why use the reproductive class argument?
Then you get into the "but scientists say that it's more complicated than just chromosomes"...and I'll end up where we started. Plus she will then bring up sex-changing fish (apparently birds and mammals are unusual in having their sex linked to chromosomes rather than other factors - I checked) and will use the "if fish can do it then scientists in the future will be able to make humans do it - you'd never have predicted IVF etc" argument....
On a slight tangent does anyone know of anywhere in the world that has a useable, non-circular legal definition of sex?