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I'm not going to go into the semantics game of gender. It is a trap that has consumed too much time for ultimately no purpose.
Sex is far more important: and indelible in which the exceptions make the rule in nature. The male anglerfish is a male anglerfish. Evolution has shaped him to end his life as a vestigal set of gonads, his face permanently melded into his mate's flesh. It is a horrible fate, but that is what nature dictates his life and function to be. A transgender human is more capable, for human beings in general are more capable, but all humans are animals and must obey what nature has endowed them with.
A MtF lacks the qualia of female-ness... womanhood is not acquired, but innate. As a 4chan shitpost brilliantly in my memory states: the state of being is inachievable by any level of becoming. They may claim to have been born a woman and assigned male, but they have the sex organs of a male: the body of a male. Their conception of what a woman is no different than their conception of what a transcendent posthuman intelligence would be. Or what an anglerfish imagines a man to be: fundamentally limited by the limitations of their bodies.
In other words: women don't have to think about passing, and neither do men, because by nature they are effortlessly what their birth sex is as their gender, to the point where the two terms are identical. It is only the trans perspective that insists on a duality!
Even if the technology were perfect: if it were a machine that turned XY to XX, they would still not be a woman. They would be a man who has become a woman through scientific miracle. The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part. In the modern day, the best they can do is 'you are a man who is trying to become a woman, and failing'. And, in spite of that failure, demanding the special privileges of those who are women anyway.
To contrast, human flight has obvious and inevitable consequence for those who do not respect the natural law: that we lack a righting instinct to pull out of death spirals, that we are susceptible to horizon illusions that kill many pilots, etc... it is not comparable. That is the price we pay for heavier than air flight. Transness would be to insist to the universe that you be treated like a swan.
But see, I don't think it is, or rather it's not the only contentious part. It might be the sole sticking point for a few idiosyncratic philosophers on Internet forums, but it isn't the objection in the real world. I think the conservative position, and in particular the argument from telos, is very much "you shouldn't cut your breasts off, inject yourself with testosterone, and change your name to Jonathan", not just "by all means do all those things if you want, but in an important philosophical and semantic sense, they still won't make you a man, sorry". I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
The ontological impossibility of becoming truly indistinguishable from a biological member of the sex towards which you wish to transition cannot in itself be a compelling reason not to transition, any more than "you'll never be a bird" is a compelling reason not to build a plane. The telos framework which argues otherwise is smuggling in more assumptions than the physical impossibility of ignoring the universe. I'm not saying there's no philosophical background behind those additional assumptions, but I do think they're a lot less intuitively compelling than "you can't ignore the physical universe" and it's disingenuous to hide them behind the can't-ignore-reality thing. Hence the motte and bailey accusation.
If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition? This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women. Nobody would believe them if they claim it has nothing to do with women because that would be a really weird coincidence. And most conservatives (and most people) would look askance at someone surgically reducing the function of their body for no articulable reason whatsoever, which this would be.
Well, for a start, they might think it feels good, and/or makes them attractive. You may be interested in parts of this Ozy post, though it's not making this argument:
Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.
As such:
This feels like a strawman. My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways. They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate. Compare furries, who don't need to pretend that their aesthetic is completely unrelated to dogs to acknowledge that they have little in common with real dogs, and generally don't want to be exactly like real dogs anyway.
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