I'm going to paste in Jane Clare Jones' Twitter thread I mentioned above, because it's too good not to.
She was replying to a tweet saying:
So next time a TERF asks you about "biological sex", ask them what they mean: Genetics? Internal organs? External organs? Hormones? Neurology? And why are supposed feminists so focused on reducing people to their genitals and how they reproduce?
We mean 'reproductive function'
Which, oh look, you kind of admitted you understand at the end of your tweet.
And we're not reducing 'people' to their reproductive function. We're saying a person's sex is their reproductive function. Because um, that's what sex means.
It's true you can split the components which go together to make up someone's reproductive function into these different elements.
And it is true that in a very small number of cases not all those components go together.
But this idea that sex is all these different components, rather than sex being the function that all these different components enable is BATS.
And again, it's a product of a flat-headed essentialist idea that something's being is a list of properties... that in order to understand what something is we have to take it apart and identify all the bits and that the bits are what makes it what it is.
That's not how we identify and classify things. We don't walk into a room and think 'oh look, there is a object with four legs and a back it must be a chair.' We see the object we make for one person to sit on. We interact with it as 'the sitting on thing.'
That is, very often, we interact with and categorise objects by what they do. Not by lists of properties. The properties are of course related to what they do. Because Form -> Function. And difference in Form -> Function matter especially when distinguishing one object from another similar object that serves a similar function.
A mug is a vessel for drinking hot liquid. Hence, has a handle, made of stuff that holds hot liquid.
A glass is a vessel for drinking cold liquid. Hence, doesn't need a handle, can be made of stuff that sometimes shatters if you put hot stuff in it.
Things ARE NOT lists of properties. They are things which have evolved, or been made, with a particular arrangement of parts, to do certain things.
SEX IS A FUNCTION.
It's mad to me that people keep insisting on the 'list of properties' idea about how concepts work.
If you look in a dictionary it is really evident that we understand perfectly well that that is very often not how we classify, or not the primary thing we do when classifying.
(Definition screenshots: glass - 2. a drinking container made from glass. / chair - 1. a separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs)
As in these definitions, the identification of properties is secondary to the identification of function.
We will notice is 'the sitting thing for one person' has a back or not, and then we divide those into 'chair' and 'stool.'
A glass will usually be made of glass, but sometimes not... and we might then end up saying something which might sound oxymoronic, but actually carries sense perfectly... like 'the plastic glass'... because we understand that 'glass' in this context actually means 'cold liquid drinking thing.'
That is, classifying things relies MASSIVELY on function, and on the fact that concepts are what we use to INTERACT with the world. And it is only when idiot philosophers sit in their 'one person sitting objects' and just stare at stuff without actually doing things with them that they come up with stupid ideas about how concepts work by us breaking things into parts and identifying all the properties.
GAH.