User blog comment:Necrosanity/The Ultimate Conundrum Cracker/@comment-4295646-20130518231134

No, no, no. Hang on there.

Sex is determined according to physical traits. Gender is better defined in connection to personal identity. That's how transgender becomes a thing, for instance. And gender, unlike sex, has to do with much more than copulation.

So, returning to your question: do the dead still have gender? Sure, if you believe in souls and whatnot. (I wonder if "genderless" counts as a gender category, as contradictory as it might sound. I mean, we have "asexual" as a category within sexual preference . . .)

But are they still sexed? Well, now I think it comes down to purpose. And for most intents and purposes I can think of, we find use in determining the sex of a corpse. Forensically, medically, historically, the sex of a recently dead person's remains is interesting. That remains true no matter how little matter remains. Archaeologists and anthropologists can dig up a long-fossilized human femur and want to know everything about it.

Sexing dust, though, is - at this point - beyond our capabilities. It's not recognizeable as human anymore so who cares. We all have particles of dead humans floating in and out of our lungs at all times; nobody gives that much thought because it's functionally impossible to differentiate them from particles of other things. So once the remains cross some threshold, past which we no longer recognize them as uniquely human, who cares. There's my two cents.