"What makes a man a male and a woman a female?"

Why must we have two classes of people? Don't all of us have qualities of masculine and feminine? All of us have testosterone and estrogen coursing through our bodies - though our sexual organs tend to favor one or the other. There are men who grow breasts. There are aggressive and unnurturing women. How much cocoa do you have to add to the food before it becomes chocolate flavored? Perhaps we are all a blending of both genders.

That said, I do think there are people who seek contentment in their lives by living as the gender opposite to what society identified them to be. I don't see that as wrong or right, normal or aberrant. A person has certain natural freedoms to decide their behavior, enabling all of us to create our identities, our understanding of ourselves. To impose our own understanding of gender is to suppress that freedom of others, is it not?

I think what really bothers people is when they are deceived or surprised in the discovery of another person's nature against their representation of identity. We don't like to be lied to by "honest" salesmen. If the city council places a stop sign at a safe corner for our "safety", we wonder why it should be imposed upon our attention and behavior. If one perceives himself to be heterosexual, he doesn't want to discover that another person with whom he has been intimate is homosexual, and vice-versa.

When you ask what makes a person male or female, I would retort: why are you confused? All words carry meaning. That meaning differs from person to person, between contexts, and changes over time. Words are just vehicles of meaning in the transportation system of communication. If you like Fords, does that preclude others from driving Hondas?

Consider this: if you lived a few thousand years ago, you would have seen no "men" or "women" signs on the bathrooms, because the side of the trail or the pit out 'round the back of your hut would have been where you relieved yourself. People had more critical things to worry about than privacy or gender identity. May I submit that your question and corresponding confusion are artifacts of the society you live in, arising from something other than the nature of humankind.

"Miracle: An event that either makes an exception of one or more of the known laws of nature or otherwise is unexplainable." ... The "known" laws of nature. There is the key to deciding an answer to the question of whether miracles exist. To a native american of the early 1800s, witnessing a locomotive would fit the definition. To us, perhaps seeing a particular political candidate winning office might be.

All of our minds consist of a collection of internetworked neurons programmed by the limited experiences in our lives. Learning is nothing more than bringing the unexplainable into one's knowledge, bringing the patterns in our brains closer to reality. Everyone moves from states of unawareness to understanding. As our understanding can never reach a perfect correlation with reality, we must always experience miracles in our lives.

There is a universal example that falls in this category you call a "miracle". That is human consciousness. We all experience it every day, and yet none of us knows why that thing you call yourself is attached specifically to your body. Our consciousness has a definite location and perception in this world. For whatever reason, we lack the capacity to fully understand this relationship of our thoughts to the physical world, and because of that it can never be known. Consciousness is an example of a miracle that everyone that can think experiences.

So the answer to the question of whether there are miracles must be "yes". That is not because we are experiencing something beyond natural law, but because it conflicts with our present understanding of it.