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Bad analogy. The question "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a query about whether an edge case falls inside a category. In the sex/gender debate, equivalent questions might include "is an emasculated male with breast implants a woman?" or "is a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome a woman?"
It's also a bad analogy because nothing actually hinges on the question of whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Quite a lot does hinge on the question "what is a woman?"
The third reason it's a bad analogy is because "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a question which inspires disagreement, but which no one feels the least bit of discomfort about answering, and will be happy to present arguments for or against ("it's a piece of meat surrounded by bread, so it's a sandwich!" "but it's only one piece of bread, while a sandwich has two pieces!"). By contrast, among progressives the stock response to the question "what is a woman?" is a sputtering refusal to answer, usually attempting to dodge it by changing the subject ("I'm not a biologist", "I take care of people with many different identities"). This is not because it's a complicated question, but because progressives know that one answer ("an adult human female") will anger woke people, while the other answer ("anyone who identifies as one") will make them look like a lunatic.
...until some arcane point of tax or tariff law depends on it (this was why the Supreme Court had to weigh in on whether a tomato is a fruit), and the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe converge on different answers.
Again, that might be different if progressives had read the Sequences.
Another possible response might be "With what purpose do you inquire?".
And what is a 'female'?
Even limiting ourselves to biological factors, there are at least five possible definitions.
I have a hard time envisioning a helpful "purpose" for which the answer to the question "what is a woman?" includes people with penises.
It's been awhile since I read the Sequences, but my recollection is that Big Yud put a lot of stock in the idea of definitions that "cleave reality at the joints". Like Zack Davis, I think he ought to take his own advice: I'm baffled as to how he (or anyone else for that matter) could think that the definition "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is one that cleaves reality at the joints, as opposed to "a woman is an adult female human".
An entity born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes.
Any purpose that does not involve anyone interacting with said penes.
Sometimes reality has multiple sets of joints, and at which ones we choose to cleave reality can be a function of our goals; e. g. the currently accepted definition of 'fish', excluding whales, cleaves reality at the joints of 'evolutionary relatedness', whereas older definitions which include whales cleave reality at a different set of joints, namely body shape and habitat.
So you would consider someone with XY chromosomes, who, due to some hormonal-response factor, developed ovaries instead of testicles, to be female?
Well, that's just sort of stupid, isn't it? Male people have an insurmountable advantage in strength and speed over female people, and this advantage doesn't disappear even if the male people in question have "medically transitioned". Ergo, any definition of "woman" which includes people with penises will make it impossible for female people to have a fair shot at winning sporting competitions. This is true even though none of the people involved will ever interact with any of the penes involved at any point.
I know they're the same word, but the concept of "sex" has meaning and predictive power beyond the narrow domain of "sexual intercourse" and "sexual gratification".
True. And I think the goals of the trans activist movement are incoherent, quixotic and disturbing. You'll note that, unlike the various definitions for "woman" proposed by trans activists, both the current definition and the older definition of "fish" were coherent, self-consistent and non-circular. I have a hard time believing that any circular definition can possibly cleave reality at any of its claimed joints.
Does such a person exist in reality, or is this a hypothetical?
Caster Semanya comes close, but does not have ovaries. I'm not aware of an 46,XY DSD condition which results in ovary development -- all I know of result in either testes (as with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which Semanya has) or non-functional undifferentiated gonads.
Doesn't matter, though; those are intersex conditions, and are rare enough to simply be taken as exceptional cases. That there are a few edge cases that blur the lines doesn't mean the lines don't exist.
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