The app for independent voices
> " Since I would consider them female, that rules out (for me) the use of ovaries as a distinguishing feature."
That that "rules out ... ovaries" for you really doesn't cut much ice as far as mainstream biology goes. Reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries -- and no few reputable biologists and philosophers -- STIPULATE that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless:
academic.oup.com/molehr… (see the Glossary)
twitter.com/pwkilleen/s… (Oxford Dictionary of Biology)
From the first link above, the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
And reputable mainstream and popular dictionaries -- like Oxford-Languages/Oxford-English-Dictionary -- say pretty much the same thing:
OED: "male, adjective: Of or denoting the sex that produces gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."; web.archive.org/web/201…
OED: "female, adjective: Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes"; web.archive.org/web/201…
That's generally the problem -- virtually everyone, with the exception of the above noted sources and much of mainstream biology, thinks they can peddle their own idiosyncratic and self-serving definitions for the sexes, and then expects everyone else to follow suit. A case in point being a particularly demented transwoman, Riley Dennis, who seems to "think" that being female is simply a matter of best 3 out of 5:
Rational(?)Wiki: "On biological sex: 'For example, if someone was assigned male at birth, but took puberty blockers and hormones and had a vaginoplasty, they would have 'female' hormones, secondary sex characters, and genitals. So, three of their five ways of determining sex would be 'female'... That means three-fifths of the sex criteria point to female, and only one-fifth points to male – and if you believe that sex is an unchanging biological fact, that couldn’t be possible. But it is.' ...."
If you're not going endorse those biological definitions then how are yours any better than Dennis'? Because you say so? It's not a free-for-all where anyone can play.
The fact of the matter is that there are a great many solid reasons for those biological definitions. . You may wish to take a gander at my post “Rerum cognoscere causas” [To understand the causes of things] on some of those solid philosophical justifications for that “interpretation” – mostly based on a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Mechanisms in Science [and biology]”: