Mostly, my way of dealing with these sorts of questions is to accept that category memberships exist in categorizing minds rather than in the things being categorized. Which means that when I ask whether Sam is a man or a woman or a male or a female or a dolphin or etc., I'm asking two questions:
* What are my criteria for membership in the categories man, woman, male, female, dolphin, etc.?
* How well does Sam match those criteria?

Of course, other people may have different criteria for membership in those categories. So the question arises of how we address those disagreements.

That's not a simple question, and I won't try to answer it here. But I do think it's helpful to understand that they are social question, like similar questions about categories like wife and husband and citizen and employee and etc.

Asking about whether Sam is really a man or a woman or a dolphin (or a wife or a husband or a citizen or an employee), as though there were some fact of the matter outside of the categories we agree on, can confuse that understanding.