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There are no insights to be drawn from the comparison, because you never stop to define what a "mom" is. If "mom" is defined as "the person from whose womb a child sprung," then step-moms are not moms, and nor are women who use surrogate mothers. If it means, as you hint is can, "the person who nutured you in the manner that our society associates with motherhood," then a step-mother can be a mother. As can arguably a man. And different definitions can be used in different contexts; for the purpose of determining who has the right to due process before being deprived of parental rights, a stepmother who has not adopted her stepchild might not be deemed to be the child's mother. But for purposes of determining who gets to go to mother-daughter day at the ballpark, she probably is.
Similarly, whether a transwoman is a "real woman" depends entirely on the definition one uses. And, that, of course, is the root of the dispute. People on the right think that self-identification is completely meaningless, while those on the left think that it is the whole thing, at least for the issues that they care about. And, of course, self-identification is often all that defines group membership in many contexts. But obviously not all.
Two problems with that:
If man/woman is defined through self-identification, then the definition becomes recursive, and therefore useless. I have no idea whether or not I am a woman, because I don't know whether I identify as one, because I don't know what a woman is.
The left does not think it is the whole thing. Relatively recently there was a shooting, where the shooter identified as non-binary. No one on the left believed him.
There are two large dense clusters in gender-identity space. Membership in these clusters is strongly, but not perfectly, correlated with genital configuration at birth. Therefore, the clusters can be defined by natal anatomy of their modal members, and individuals' gender can be defined by membership in one cluster or the other.
I'm not sure how well gender identity can be described as a space. It makes more sense to say that there are two large dense clusters in human-space (or something of that sort), corresponding to the two sexes/genders (since they're the same for most people). I suppose you could make identity one axis (well, it's not really continuous, I think, but whatever), but that doesn't really give a reason to privilege that axis above others.
In any case, I don't think it works to try to suggest we should use a "we take into account all the factors and see which they approximate the most overall" to argue that "this one factor is what matters" is the right way to do things.
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