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EDITED FOR CLARITY.
I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.
The left just happens to disagree with your assertion that 'anyone born with male parts is and will always be a man.' This is not saying 'men can be women' so much as 'you are wrong about who is a man and who is a woman.' The standard view on the left, as I understand it, is that if John Doe comes out as a transwoman (changing her name to Jane Doe), then Jane Doe was always a woman, and our (and her) previous belief that she was a man was an error of fact, and mutatis mutandis for transmen.
People who have Read The Sequences, on the other hand, hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory, and their definitions depend on which hidden inference one is asking about.
Trans rationale is just a rhetorical three cup trick where the desired outcome is slipped underneath whichever restlessly rotating definition suits the advocate. They'll say whatever improves their position. If it's "men can be women" that's what they'll say, and if you argue that men can't be women they'll slip the ball under a different cup. The left plays the role of the stooge, be that willing or unwillingly.
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The left != people who have Read The Sequences. Also, I don't see how this idea is any less kooky.
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If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman, without qualifiers?
More generally, intellectual embroidery is, I think, how the transition from "kooky" to "consensus" is achieved. Reality contains infinite, fractal complexity; we emphasize or elide that infinite complexity as needed to conform what we see to what we think.
But this is arguing that "universal regard" is the definition of gender. Those sorts of assumptions are exactly what is being disagreed with. That's why there's "assigned gender at birth".
"Assigned gender at birth" can rescue you if you have a pre-transition person that already wants to change their gender, but it won't when "universally regarded" includes the person in question themselves. If they denied that men can be women, that would mean someone who changed their mind later on either has always been a woman, or that they're not a woman now, which pro-trans people don't believe.
I think the way to rescue this is to hold that a person has privileged insight into their own gender but can still be mistaken.
The existence of post-transition trans people who are by their account much less in conflict with their gender perception demonstrates that that there is sometimes privileged insight that is true, or at least beneficial to assume. The existence of trans people who detransition doesn't disprove the existence of those people, it merely establishes that the correlation isn't perfect.
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