Altho the distinction between person and human being may often not have been made at all, this is an anthropocentric fallacy we can dismiss immediately. A third way of subdividing living beings is into sexual and asexual beings. This is an aspect we must take into consideration for a moment before turning to the issue of personhood itself. Speakers of the traditional variants of the present and of many other languages, but also many speakers of languages which were never genderized, have always convulsively clung to the discrimination between male and female persons. Yet, the factor on which this distinction is based actually concerns living beings in general and not especially persons.
Sexual beings are either unisexual or hermaphroditic.
This conception is based on the kind of sexual differentiation, or lack thereof, as found on Earth. But theoretically one could conceive of a form of life which depends for its direct reproduction on the union of the genetic material of three or more individuals of the same number of three or more different reproductive divisions. In the sense of complexity or natural, bodily development such a species would be of a 'higher' level than the one to which human and other living beings on this planet belong. While living beings may be asexual, female, male, hermaphroditic or something else, they belong to one of these sexual categories on account of their body , whether it be its parts or its general physical characteristics. No living being is male, female or something else as a person because many sexual living beings simply are not persons.