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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.
I think the biggest problem with the passage you quoted is that neither the left nor the right are a singular ideological block with regards to their views on identity.
I don't buy this one though. You can totally have purely personally chosen definitions, because- well, because in a sense you are right. There's no such thing as a purely recursive identity. People choose identities because those identities mean something to them, those meanings are imbibed from the world. They don't go around pulling identities out of the aether. So the more meaningless an identity word becomes in the world, the fewer people choose it, and the fewer people choose it, the more meaningful it becomes. This creates a self-correcting balance on the amount of collapse in meaning an identity word can undergo, even if you let anyone choose to use any identity word.
You end up with a recursive algorithm for the definition similar to PageRank. Where the perceived definition of an Identity word is coordinated around the people who choose to use it, who choose to use it because it's meaning resonates with them, where the meaning resonates with them because people like them choose it.
This is related to your other point actually. I think it's motivated reasoning, but what those leftists are saying is that the shooter doesn't actually self-identify with the words they are saying. You can lie about your feelings and personal meanings, and self-identity is about feelings and personal meanings, not spoken words. It was a sort of conspiracy hypothesis that the shooter was just saying that they're enby as a personal psyop because they hate enbies.
I'd buy that if there were several observable factions on the left, fighting each other over the gender ID of the shooter, but as far as I can tell the reaction was basically uniformly "nah, he's full of shit". There might be some exceptions, but they're overwhelmed by the consensus.
There's a problem with that too. You can go with a definition like that for identifying as Goth or something, but the moment a cluster emerges, so will a set of defining features. If I can be Goth without taking on the Goth appearance, listening to the music, or doing anything else that Goths do, the word is meaningless again.
In the case of "woman" you have another problem on top of that, because any non-biological definition will necessarily rely on appearance and behavior, but the feminist movement has spent decades pushing back against labeling certain type of behaviors and appearance as feminine. So you can't use that definition without dismissing feminism... which is the source of the conflict with TERFs, I guess.
The word is meaningless with respect to you. But as long as "that guy is goth" is a statement that is able to update my audience's priors towards- you know. The people you and I think of as goth, the word still has meaning.
I do think you need some level of ability to say "yeah that guy calls himself goth but... he only wears bright colors. So... uh... you know."
But in practice you rarely need to use this, because the guy wearing bright colors doesn't call himself goth very often, and the fact that brightcolor guys 'usually' don't gall them selves goth, means that there is still a lot of specificity in the word goth, even if you religiously humor every bright shirted 'goth's identity.
Similarly the traditional meaning of the word 'woman' doesn't totally break down until 50% of women are men who look and act like men. And this is never going to happen. Don't get me wrong, the worst case scenario for 'woman' as an identity is still pretty bad if you favor the traditional one. But it's only going to be the most fem and fem-aspirational men and a handful of extreme outliers. Perhaps it might eventually mutate further in some still stranger direction, but it's never going to cease to be interpretable as a statistical statement about someone's likely attributes.
Sometimes I am frustrated by this whole concept because.... in terms of wanting the interpretability to hold- that breaks down no matter how you change gender norms. If you call a fully transitioned trans man a 'woman', I still have to deal with the word 'woman' meaning almost nothing relevant to my conception of what that's supposed to entail in this context. Dude this guy has a six inch beard and is made of muscle and speaks in a gruff voice and says he's a man what are you talking about? I do not need to be told he has XX chromosomes and was born with a vagina. I need actionable information please.
But similarly, I do think it's reasonable to treat this like the goth case. "That person is a woman, but, they don't like... have a womb. So... uh... you know."
Though I think its a real dick move to treat them poorly over it.
As for Terfs... I actually model Terfs as the opposite. Most Terfs are pro gender norms. The idea is that- being a woman is a pretty chill deal if you play by the conservative rules, in that you get an exclusion from competing with men on being one. There is some of the "You guys are reifying gender norms" stuff, but I see more of that from the leftist professors posting yet another hot gender take than the Terfs. Terfs tend to be perfectly happy wielding gender norms as a weapon against other women, trans or otherwise, in my experience. I see them more as a spiritual successor of the lesbian exclusionaries of second wave feminism. Though I do think there are more 'real' fears involved with accepting trans women than lesbian women.
Well yeah, you can only have "people you and I think of as goth" only if there's some way to say "this guy calls himself goth, but he's not".
Well, for one the rarity of the cases is small comfort given their egregiousness, we've already had a bunch of sentencing day transitions by absolute psychos who wanted to go to women's prisons.
Another thing is that this is only true because a lot of people are devoted to maintaining the material/biological definition of the word. If self-ID becomes undisputed, I'll be identifying as a one any time I'm accused of sexism, and by then I will hopefully be able to also identify as black whenever racism comes up.
I don't follow. The traditional meaning of the word "woman" does not break down no matter how people act. It's a biological category.
I don't see how calling that person a man is actionable information. I try not to treat people differently based on their sex, and adapt to their individual personality.
I'll grant you that feminists generally play dirty by alternating appeals to equality and appeals to chivalry, but political lesbianism is hardly what I'd call "conservative rules".
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