The Number 144,000 Is Literal — Every Other Detail Is Symbolic
JWs take the number 144,000 in and 14:1 as mathematically literal: exactly 144,000 anointed Christians will rule with Christ in heaven. However, every other element of the same passage — the gender ('not defiled with women' = male), the virginity, the tribal ethnicity ('twelve tribes of the sons of Israel'), and the tribal arithmetic (12,000 from each) — is interpreted symbolically as standing for spiritual purity, spiritual Israel, and so on. There is no exegetical basis offered for why one element of the enumeration is literal and the rest are symbolic. This selective hermeneutic is the foundation of the entire two-class salvation system.
A consistent reader has two honest options. Either is a literal census — in which case the 144,000 are necessarily male, celibate, ethnically Jewish men from twelve named tribes, and no Gentile woman qualifies — or the number is symbolic like everything else in the passage, in which case the two-class salvation system loses its numerical cap entirely. The Watchtower cannot have both. The same chapter uses deliberately symbolic language throughout (seals, horses, trumpets, a Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes), and places a numberless 'great crowd' before the throne and in God's naos (temple) — the same heavenly location used for every other throne scene in the book. Pick a hermeneutic and apply it consistently.