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Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."
It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth. We're a sexually dimorphic species. There are plenty of tests which easily tell the two groups apart with 99.99% accuracy, and if you're MtF you'd sure as hell better inform your doctor of that fact rather than acting like you're just a normal woman.
Joe Blow down the street thinks he's Napoleon. So, it's not a "universally-accepted truth" that he's not Napoleon. And maybe he gets violent if you don't affirm his Napoleonness in person, so there are cases where feeding his delusion is the path of least resistance. There's a "fundamental values conflict" there. But it remains an objective truth that he's not Napoleon.
I think this is a category error. It would be a bit like saying, "Scientifically speaking, an in-law is not your relative." Like, sure, I have no biological relationship to my mother-in-law, but we have a societal convention that marriage creates kin relationships, to not just my wife, but her whole family.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to say something like, "Scientifically speaking, 'adopted children' do not exist." Again, we normally consider the parent-child relationship to be biological, but adopted children and adoptive parents are granted an honorary parent-child relationship as a societal convention.
I think transness is best explained as an honorary social status. It has a family resemblance to institutions like the sworn virgins of Albania, or Queen Hatshepsut's honorary maleness. It's just an emerging social role within some Anglo-European societies, where a person of one sex declares that they would like to live as the other sex, usually adopting as much of the appearance of the opposite sex as possible and requesting treatment appropriate to that adopted sex role. It's not "scientific" to say, "transwomen are women", but neither is saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son." But we shouldn't expect all "true" statements to be true in a scientific way, rather than in an intersubjective cultural way.
Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention. (Note that it would be equally incorrect to say "an in-law is your blood relative".) So I don't agree with your analogies; saying "trans women are women" is just an incorrect statement of fact, rather than describing social conventions.
That said, I do think your framing of transness as a social status is reasonable. If we were simply allowed to say someone was "living as the other sex", rather than the Orwellian thought control that the ideologues insist on, I think it wouldn't be nearly as controversial.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
It's whomever produces large or small gametes.
People who don't produce any are, in every case, a defective version of one or the other (yes this includes all types of intersex people). There's no example of true hermaphrodites in humans.
Why does that matter? Because the energetic economics of gamete size determine all the higher levels of abstraction over them. Up and including the forms of deceit you'd need to use to play at Diogenes.
I've actually always felt that this is kind of an odd abstraction from a philosophical stand point, wherever we do it - not just in the trans domain.
If we're talking about the "facts" about a person's biology, then shouldn't we actually talk about the empirical facts?
Like, if we want the central definition of dog to be something like, "Four-legged animal descended from wolves", then it seems a bit odd to me to say that a congenitally three-legged dog is "actually" a defective four-legged animal. It seems to me that it actually is a three legged animal, and while the central definition of dog might have four legs, it is actually fuzzier in the way almost all biological definitions are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. I get the idea of human category making involving a central exemplar, and then making accomodations for difference. If I saw a purple horse, I would not lose all sense and go, "What kind of strange creature is this?", but I'd also be prepared to widen my effective definition of horses to include the possibility of non-central horses like a congenitally purple horse, the same way I do for albino or melanistic animals.
It kind of strikes me as a strange sort of epicycle to justify having any definitions at all in the biological space.
Like, by what metric is a person with Turner's syndrome (X0-karyotype) actually a "defective" woman? Sure, she'll have feminine anatomy, but she doesn't naturally undergo puberty and can't produce large gametes. If we're talking about congenital biology, that seems like a natal null to me, and our medical science is currently capable of pushing her body in a more womanly direction. But that was an intervention - it is not natural. How can we say she is a "biological woman", or a "defective biological woman" if we're using the gamete definition of sex? Surely, there would then be some ground to claim that a trans woman is just an extremely defective biological woman by the same token?
If we can admit comparisons and contrasts to the larger class as a non-central example, then it seems to me the limits of inclusion are social willingness and not any "objective" facts about the reference class.
Edit: Typo, flow.
Culturally speaking, the alternative way of dealing with the problem of defective people is to put them in their own category.
Occidentals don't like to do this for reasons that take whole books to explain, but if you want to have a third social role made of eunuchs and other infertile people, it has ample precedent.
Biologically speaking however, Turner syndrome women do have female anatomy, which I find is too important to gloss over as you do.
A trans woman isn't a defective woman by this logic because all or most of the other abstractions carried on top of being the one that produces the abundant gamete type still apply. Such as risk taking behavior, for instance.
For the purposes of reproduction it's essential that people who carry the rare gamete are protected and easily identifiable, and most of the objections to muddying those waters come from that base reality. Not from people making themselves eunuchs.
Yeah, when it comes to biological sex, I think a three sex model makes the most sense: male, female, neuter. It just seems like desperate grasping at straws to insist that there are only two sexes, especially when the popular definition seems to be the gamete model (in that it is what Trump's EO uses.)
There are four ways gametes can be present in an individual: small, large, both, and neither. Humans do not naturally produce both gametes, therefore we are left with three categories. Attempts to avoid this conclusion just seem to be socially motivated ways to avoid putting a person in an "othered" category. The category makers would rather someone be a "weird woman" than a third thing that is almost a woman.
Then you could make a natural vs. artificial distinction. Today, we only have artificial neuters, though we have quasi-artificial females (with Turner's syndrome people who are given hormone therapy and possibly IVF with donor eggs still failing to be gametically female, but getting about as close as a human can be to female without being one.) Perhaps some day there will be artificial females and males, but we're not there today.
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