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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.
This line of reasoning always gets me. Person claims to be of different gender. People point out that this person isn't actually behaving like the target gender. Person claims have wrong views about what that gender is like.... well then what makes you think you are of that gender? Maybe the gender you currently have is also misunderstood and your biology actually got it right but societies views of it is not right?
You say "what is a woman and what would be required to be one" and I say if someone cannot answer definitively what a woman is then how can they possibly claim to be one.
Pretty sure that gender to progressives is something you self ID as and not something you are. Yes, this seems obviously stupid and at least a little inconsistent, but more people are stupid and inconsistent than they are deliberately evil.
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The best way to understand this ideology is to assume its trying to destabilize society by trans-ing as many people as possible. The purpose of destabilization is to facilitate a revolution toward some nebulous utopia. The individual agents of this ideology may or may not explicitly recognize this, and even fewer say it out loud and in public. Most have internalized some incoherent set of arguments which superficially appeal to liberal principles, and they intuitively understand what they are expected and forbidden to say and think. It is low status to be seen to disagree or oppose this ideology, and the worst fear of many people is to be mistaken for the wrong sort of person.
The arguments are just tools deployed strategically to increase the number of trans people given the context. There are no unifying principles, and there is no explanatory theory that ties it all together. Water is wet when saying so increases the number of trans people, and water is dry when saying so increases the number of trans people. Those individuals within the fold who try to stick to a principle or rationalize the theory inevitably find themselves as outcasts, because at some point they derive a position that doesn't increase the number of trans people.
Incoherence is swept away by continuously redefining and coining new terms. Both the theories and social dynamics encourage dogmatic thinking and suppression of wrongthink. Agents are led to enmesh their personal identity, their sense of self-worth and purpose, with the ideology, such that they cannot be separated. Attacks on these ideas are then reflexively construed as attacks on people. Objectivity is impossible. Rational discussion is prohibited. Conflicts can then only be resolved by manipulation and power relations.
These are the dark arts.
Please. "destabilize society in pursuit of a vague utopia" does not seem like a reasonable motive without some strong supporting evidence. I think what we're actually looking at is self expression values taken to their logical conclusion, not some kind of agenda against society because society being able to be undermined from inside just doesn't occur to them.
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