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I just came across a word that I feel could be very useful in the trans debate: signalment. Specifically, I'm inspired by the way the term is used in verterinary medicine.
I feel like this term captures an important point I've seen brought up in a few contexts - that a person's status as transgender might matter to their doctor, and their sexual partners, but it doesn't matter much to their social interactions in ~90% of cases. "Signalment" seems to capture the idea of "medically necessary information needed by a physician to narrow down their search space and provide quality care." Just as it might be important to know that dalmations are more prone to bladder stones than other breeds, it might be important to know that a patient is "Female, with a hysterectomy, and on testosterone for the last 3 years" because that might provide unique medical information that could be useful to the proper treatment of a patient.
I think it also bypasses some of the issues people take with terms like "biological sex" or "gametic sex."
Instead of saying, "Your biological sex is still male though", to a transwoman, you could instead say, "Your sex signalment is 'male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years.'"
Then we could have the following distinction:
Signalment: All the medically relevant information about a patient.
Courtesy title (honorific), personal pronouns and gender identity: All of the social information that will make interacting with the patient easier.
So a patient might be Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], with a sex signalment of "male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years."
While I applaud the attempt, I don't think you can solve anything this way. At its core, the trans debate is a values debate, not a confusion of terminology. The left-ish side (as I understand it, not trying to strawman) is that you need to do whatever you can to respect people's feelings, and that this stuff is all socially constructed anyway. So if John says he's Jane now, then you owe it to Jane to try to be courteous by respecting her decision. The right-ish side is that while respecting people's feelings is important, recognizing objective reality is more important. And if John says he's Jane now, yeah no he can't become John just by fiat. He's a man who wears dresses and got his genitals removed, not actually a woman (which is something we simply do not have the medical technology to grant at this time).
There's nuance to this, and it's basically impossible to boil everything down to a simple "this vs that" idea. I have no doubt that there are many people on both sides of the trans debate whose positions I didn't capture. In fact, I know there's a religious argument I didn't touch on and really is kind of orthogonal to the "anti" perspective I gave. But the point is, even though many different values exist in this soup, the fundamental issue is one of values. If it were a terminology issue, then it would've been resolved ages ago. So as much as I think your post is well-intentioned, I think it's also fundamentally incapable of actually resolving anything.
A large part of the anti-trans side, such as the religious people you mentioned, wouldn't accept Jane as a woman even if we had magical-level medical technology.
As for those who do accept that medical technology currently cannot make Jane "actually a woman", but it might be able to do so in the future – and I am assuming you belong to this group – I have to ask: what is a woman? What medical procedure would Jane need to "actually" become a woman?
Is it about external appearance? In that case, Jane can already easily get very convincing breasts, and it is my understanding that a convincing neovagina can also be created, though this is more complicated than breasts. The neovagina wouldn't be able to provide lubrication for sex, but we're talking about appearance.
Is it about reproduction? Medicine isn't very close to allowing trans women to get pregnant, but if this is needed for a woman to be "actually a woman", then plenty of cisgender women who are unable to get pregnant would also be excluded.
Is it about genetics and chromosomes? Now we get into various intersex conditions, and again we risk excluding cisgender women, or even including cisgender men.
P.S. Note the complete absence of trans men in your comment, and their near-total absence in the broader debate. To me this indicates that concerns about trans women are not fundamentally rational, but that they are the result of some sort of deep-seated emotional concern about purity, or about women's safety (the latter indicative of a misandrist view that men are inherently dangerous). If there are people here who believe trans men aren't actually men, I kindly ask that they also provide the criteria for distinguishing men from non-men.
It's not about bright lines, it's about concept clusters. An infertile cis woman is still much closer to the most central example of "woman" than any transwoman is. And many of those infertile women still suffer serious gender dysphoria about it!
There is an author I enjoy well enough to have read eight of her books. Bu there came a point where my brain just rebelled at what I was seeing, and I simply could no longer believe that this book was written by a woman. I went to google and typed "Firstname Lastname T", and sure enough "trans" was the first autopopulate option. Someone with fewer quokka tendencies than I would have probably seen it in the first 20 pages, just from the male-autistic focus on mechanics and total dismissal of people/relations.
Generally, same as the way you criticize unmanly men, ramped up a fair bit, with extra asterisks for the medical differences. The actual reason no one worries about transmen is because they are losing privileges, and the reaction to women trying to play life on hardmode is more "LMAO, good luck, short king."
Mind saying the series? That's hilarious--haven't experienced it since wondering why that Andre Norton chap kept writing about space rangers having Meaningful Emotional Moments with each other. I thought he was just European!
Weirkey Chronicles.
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