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I've written an article in which I discuss a somewhat common idea regarding the idea of trans people "existing" [1]. Some trans rights activists (TRAs) refer to denying the statement "transwomen are women" as denying the existence of trans people. Another manifestation of this is when people argue that denying that transwomen are women is threatening to transwomen's existence. The same applies to transmen of course. I argue that these arguments rely on ambiguity in language about "existence." Denying the existence of transwomen seems very silly because that is an unusual way to describe rejecting that a transwoman actually is a woman. Phrasing this as a threat to existence evokes thoughts of genocide. I think this is another case of language being used in an unusual way that is misleading, although perhaps not intentionally. This description of "anti-trans" attitudes should be avoided as it is not accurate and morally charged in a misleading way.
[1] https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/do-transgender-people-exist
Unironically just read every LessWrong article about Definitions. In a sane world, we'd just create new words to distinguish between transwomen and women and call it a day.
LW has sensible prescriptions for the use of language as a tool for reasoning, with the ultimate goal of enabling yourself to make better predictions about the future and choose utility-maximising actions to perform. However, this is not the only capacity in which humans use language, and arguably not the one that progressive activists or transitioners care about here - in fact, for the vast majority of people, it is probably not even the main one. Language is also used to communicate information, induce emotional states in the recipient, as a surprisingly difficult to falsify signal of certain aspects of the mental state and disposition of the speaker - and, as a weird consequence of the last two, to induce emotional states in the speaker. (Why make kids and soldiers speak pledges of allegiance? The language-for-reasoning view has no explanation of this.)
From the last few aspects, a fairly relevant "newcombian" aspect of language use also follows - by consistently referring to X as Y, you really do degrade (in a publicly attested way) your ability to treat X as not-Y.
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