I asked earlier whether you can come up with a specific example of an individual organism (preferably mammalian) where the structural definition gives one answer and your functional interpretation gives another.
I don't think you're on firm footing if elementary school children are the example you want to use, since if we go by your interpretation of "strict biological definitions based on function" there is no criterion by which we can sort those who can pee standing up (whom I call "boys") from those who invariably pee sitting down (whom I call "girls"). The built environment already takes these differences into account, but your "strict biological definition" doesn't see them, because they are merely structural.
Not just
my "functional interpretation" though, is it? It's the definition of Google/OD, Wikipedia, Parker & Lehtonen, and of Griffiths. Just ran across a tweet from a UK philosopher which had quoted some definitions from the Oxford Dictionary of Biology which says pretty much the same thing:
Something that I had included in my Medium essay on
The Imperative of Categories (so to speak):
https://medium.com/@steersmann/the-imperative-of-categories-874154213e42
But would you agree that both the structural definitions of Hilton and Company, and those of Lehtonen and Company qualify as stipulative definitions? That we might then have a reasonable debate on which one is the best and most useful?
Somewhat en passant, Griffiths' preprint article raises the quite reasonable question, "Why should evolutionary biology get to define biological sexes?" Some fascinating digressions into alternative viewpoints, but the bottom line is more or less that pretty much all of the sexual dimorphism in humans - physical, biological, psychological, emotional, social, etc. - and in other anisogamic species starts from the two fundamentally different gamete types - and the processes which produce them. Something which even Hilton's definitions recognize in its "present functionality". So then the issue is what relevance or value there is in including past or future functionality.
But if they're both stipulative definitions then it's reasonable to ask, as per your sorting those who "pee standing up" and those who "pee sitting down", how the two definitions affect the definitions for "boys" and "girls". The standard for the former is:
boy (noun): a male child or young man.
But in the case of Hilton's "thesis", you really have modify that definition to qualify "male" - at least in the case of "child" - with "non-functional". You might note
theprestige added "functional" in one case of "male", and that, as I had noted, Wikipedia's article on sequential hermaphrodites does the same:
Both protogynous and protandrous hermaphroditism allow the organism to switch between functional male and functional female.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism
From which one might reasonably conclude that, by Hilton's lexicon, male and female are at least binaries themselves - or trinaries if you wish to split out "non-functional" into two subcategories. Hilton and Company are clearly making the sexes into polythetic categories, and you can't just do some hand waving and claim each subcategory is the same as the others.
But that's really pretty much the same as the functional definitions, except that now "male" has to be qualified with "pre-" or "probable".
Whether the definitions are changed to explicitly recognize those differences or not doesn't change the fact that the qualifications are implicit in the definitions chosen, and in their consequences. Don't think you can reasonably claim that there should be one type of "sauce" for the goose, and another for the gander.
It might be worth noting that the OP definition was provided in response to sex and gender issues arising amongst Homo sapiens rather than, say, sequential hermaphrodites. It might also be worth noting that the specialists who study sequential hermaphrodites seem not to suffer from confusion when observing how gametic structures change over time.
Sure. And the issue, as you suggested in the OP, is whether the strict biological definitions should apply, or the structure-absent-function ones of Hilton and Company.
But the issue really isn't whether "specialists suffer from confusion" - though clearly some of them do, at least those generalists who "think" every cell has a sex or that sex is a spectrum. Though not sure that Hilton and Company have much of a leg to stand on in throwing stones at the latter since that definition of theirs boils down into a pair of binaries or trinaries. The issue is whether the general public is "dazed and confused" by the competing "theses" - should be manifestly evident that they are: every man and their dogs riding madly off in all directions.
But seems to me you're being a bit disingenuous, at best, in thinking the issue is just a matter of who pees where. Don't see that you've addressed - surprise, surprise - the consequences of, in effect, having one set of definitions for high school classes on biology, and another quite contradictory set for those on social studies.
Once again, your functional definitions have no power to help sort prepubescent children. To you, they are all "sexless," unless you want to infer future function from current structure.
Once again, not just my functional definitions. Somewhat disingenuous, at best, to describe it as such.
But of course we can so infer: methinks there are very few "pre-males" who go on to produce ova. Largely why I suggested that "pre-" or "probable" is implicit in the definitions for "boy" and "girl". As "non-functional" is in both cases.
People using the OP definition require no such qualification, since they are free to assign sex based on structural features.
Methinks that's just trying to sweep the elephant in the living room under the rug. Probably something like a 67% chance that any given penis-haver is in fact a (functional) male, and in 2 times out of 3 making that inference probably won't be wrong or cause many problems. Likewise with vagina-havers.
But the issue is that that structural definition conflicts rather badly with the functional one. It's not just of academic interest that "from contradictions, anything follows":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
We might just as well say that black is white as to have both definitions in play. Little more than following suit with Ignatius Loyola's
Rules for Thinking with the Church:
That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity[...], if [the Church] shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.ph...er_Secondary_School,_Dindigul&oldid=797030740
"Priestesses" Heying and Hilton, and "Priest" Wright in the "Sex is Immutable" Church ...
