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If you apply your principles in half the cases, you haven't applied your principles. So I don't think a "negotiated settlement" will work.
There's also the problem you have with immigration or gun control, where any "compromise" becomes the new status quo and you end up constantly compromising on the remaining uncompromised portion. This has sort of already happened.
My principal is that "translegalism" (i.e. "transness as socially/legally adopted sex") is a firmer basis for thinking through trans issues than most TRA models of transness (including transmedicalism, identity-only, etc.) And because we're only approaching transness as a legal fiction along the lines of adoptive parenthood, it makes sense for society to negotiate which rules will apply and which ones don't.
After all, there's no universally agreed upon answer to the question, "if a man marries and becomes a step-father, then divorces his wife, should it be legally permissible for him to marry his former step-daughter?" When we created the fictive kinship relationship of "step-fatherhood" we had to make a decision about that. It's just that that was decided so long ago, that most people have forgotten it was ever a debate.
So too, the translegalist approach will have thorny issues to decide about when trans people are relevantly similar to cis people of their legal sex, and when they are not. I don't think it's about not applying principles, it's about trying to craft a rule in line with a pluralistic, inclusive liberal democracy that doesn't force anyone to have to confess a creed they don't believe in.
I think this is only right, especially on the issue of immigration. There's no objectively right answer to "how many people should we allow into the country to become U.S. citizens", so it makes sense to allow voters to elect politicians who will debate the various pros and cons of each proposal and find an amount of immigration that they're comfortable with.
I agree a "translegalist" approach will result in an ongoing back and forth of compromises, with each "compromise" becoming a new status quo. But I don't see how that's avoidable. When rights are being handled by statute or legal precedence, and not by constitutional amendment, they'll always be open to "easy" revision. We could decide tomorrow to strip women of many rights and privileges but not the right to vote, and so too we could decide to create more rights and privileges for trans people or to strip them of existing rights.
All rights have some conflict with other rights, and a liberal democracy has to determine how best to deal with conflicts of rights when they arise.
Except without the "back and forth".
"Let's compromise on 50% of my demands." Once it's done, it becomes status quo and the next one is "let's compromise on 50% of my remaining demands" and they get 75%, 87.5%, etc. of their original demands by repeatedly "compromising".
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