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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."
Isn't that the very crux of the issue? The big problem for trans activists is that using woman to describe a trans woman isn't immediately intuitively understood. That's why they need to oppress people into it.
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
Calling your adoptive child son and calling your wife's mother mom are exactly intuitive, and perfectly fine for everyday use. They might not happen immediately - the two parties involved have to develop a relationship and a sense of intimacy - but those phrases will be adopted naturally. However when the law and greater society is involved additional distinctions are required, so my son becomes my adopted son and my Ma becomes my mother in law.
And if trans activists had followed that process instead of compelling people to pretend they already had that level of intimacy with a bunch of strangers in wigs, I doubt we'd see the opposition we do today.
Edit: for flow
I suppose when I said "intuitive", I meant that it wasn't something that virtually every human culture would come up with independently.
I would assume virtually every human culture has the concept of "toy animals" or "animal statues", and that in many languages, you might colloquially refer to it as the animal in question.
Given that there are large civilizations without Western-style adoption, like the Islamic world, I take that to be a demonstration that adoptive children are only "intuitive" insofar as one is raised to consider it so.
By that same token, once transness becomes more than an emerging social role, I think it will be equally "intuitive" to consider trans women honorary women in the relevant contexts for a given social milleu. But it is not "intuitive" in the same way animal statues being the represented animal is "intuitive."
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