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It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth. We're a sexually dimorphic species. There are plenty of tests which easily tell the two groups apart with 99.99% accuracy, and if you're MtF you'd sure as hell better inform your doctor of that fact rather than acting like you're just a normal woman.
Joe Blow down the street thinks he's Napoleon. So, it's not a "universally-accepted truth" that he's not Napoleon. And maybe he gets violent if you don't affirm his Napoleonness in person, so there are cases where feeding his delusion is the path of least resistance. There's a "fundamental values conflict" there. But it remains an objective truth that he's not Napoleon.
I think this is a category error. It would be a bit like saying, "Scientifically speaking, an in-law is not your relative." Like, sure, I have no biological relationship to my mother-in-law, but we have a societal convention that marriage creates kin relationships, to not just my wife, but her whole family.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to say something like, "Scientifically speaking, 'adopted children' do not exist." Again, we normally consider the parent-child relationship to be biological, but adopted children and adoptive parents are granted an honorary parent-child relationship as a societal convention.
I think transness is best explained as an honorary social status. It has a family resemblance to institutions like the sworn virgins of Albania, or Queen Hatshepsut's honorary maleness. It's just an emerging social role within some Anglo-European societies, where a person of one sex declares that they would like to live as the other sex, usually adopting as much of the appearance of the opposite sex as possible and requesting treatment appropriate to that adopted sex role. It's not "scientific" to say, "transwomen are women", but neither is saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son." But we shouldn't expect all "true" statements to be true in a scientific way, rather than in an intersubjective cultural way.
Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention. (Note that it would be equally incorrect to say "an in-law is your blood relative".) So I don't agree with your analogies; saying "trans women are women" is just an incorrect statement of fact, rather than describing social conventions.
That said, I do think your framing of transness as a social status is reasonable. If we were simply allowed to say someone was "living as the other sex", rather than the Orwellian thought control that the ideologues insist on, I think it wouldn't be nearly as controversial.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
It's not something we can know for sure without checking, but my suspicion is that "we'll acknowledge that transwomen are women in a way similar to the Queen in chess being an honorary woman" would be welcomed by people insisting that transwomen are women. For instance, almost no one would bat an eye at someone using "it" to refer to the chess piece, implying that the speaker sees it as an object, whereas TRAs would tend to object to someone using "he" to refer to a transwoman (one who doesn't idioysncratically use masculine pronouns, anyway), implying that the speaker sees him as a man who identifies as a woman.
Besides that, of course there are a whole host of demands about what claiming that transwomen are women imply about rights and privileges transwomen are entitled to, with respect to woman-only spaces that doesn't apply to chess pieces. Since chess pieces aren't sentient or have will, the parallels break down, but to use the other example, when a child accidentally rips open his teddy bear, we don't treat it as if he just murdered his pet. When he doesn't feed it while keeping it constrained in his bedroom, we don't treat it as if he's being neglectful of or cruel to his pet.
I just don't think "transwomen are women by stretching the definition of women, but they're men in every other way we treat them in society" is a position that many people would support, certainly not among TRAs. The central conflict here has little to do with word games.
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Sorry, this is just tired philosobabble, which I have no patience for. All the biological ways to define man and woman agree in >99% of cases, and agree with what humans instinctively know, too. If you want to pretend that obvious things aren't obvious for the sake of your political goals, I'm not going to play along. That's anti-intelligence.
I don't think you can avoid doing a little philosophy when you are talking about rigorous scientific definitions.
I think you and I are in near complete agreement as far as empirically verifiable reality surrounding trans women or biological sex is concerned.
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We've had this conversation a few times before, and I don't feel like my objections were ever answered to my satisfaction. Looking deeper into the analogy clearly shows that we don't treat trans identity as anything like adoptive family, or relations through marriage. For example, if my friends invite me over, and I see their kid is black, it might be more or less appropriate to ask how that came to be, but it wouldn't be obtuse. It would be obtuse to pretend there's nothing for me to be surprised by.
Is it, though? Howcome when Trump passes his EO's the response from the mainstream media isn't "Trump Being Obtuse: Fails To Realize Trans Identity Is A Social Role, Not A Medical Claim", but "Trump'S Definition Of 'Male,' 'Female' Criticized By Medical And Legal Experts"? What would it take to show that your view on trans identity isn't what is being imposed on society right now?
I'm not responsible for the silly things other people claim, even if they come to conclusions that superficially resemble my own. Before I answer your question, let me touch on my feelings about Trump's EO.
On one level, I'm basically fine with the definitions of biological sex in Trump's EO, and I disagree with the critics that say they're malformed.
Gametic sex always felt like the best way to define biological sex to me, and I think that the people criticizing the "at conception" part of the definition are a bit wrong-headed. It makes sense that you can belong to a category (the sex that produces large or small gametes) even if you don't yet have the mature ability to do the thing characteristic of that category. A caterpillar is still a juvenile butterfly, even if it doesn't have wings.
I could quibble about the fact that at conception a fertilized egg can become one person, two people (twins) or half of a person (chimeras), and that this can technically lead to weird cases like this fertile chimera woman who was a fusion of two beings who, at conception, arguably belonged to the male sex, and the female sex - unless we count her conception as starting at the point where the chimera was formed, in which case it is not clear to me that we knew what sex she belonged to (based on the EO's definition) until she finally developed. Can a person's sex technically remain in limbo for more than a decade by this definition?
I could also quibble about people I would describe not as "intersex" but "nullsex." If sex is defined by gametes, what about people who don't naturally produce gametes? I always find it a bit odd that people with Turner syndrome (X0-karyotype) are considered "biolgical women." While they have gynomorphic anatomy, they typically do not naturally go through puberty, and do not have functional ovaries. If given hormone therapy, they'll go through a female puberty, and they can get pregnant through IVF with donor eggs, but under a gametic definition of sex they'd surely represent a third sex (a null sex.)
But I'm not inclined to such quibbling here. Law is an example of practical philosophy. Those corner cases will be dealt with by courts interpreting the definitions used. That chimera woman would likely be considered "female" by any competent court. So too, they'd likely class people with Turner syndrome as women, regardless of how the law defines "female."
To actually answer your question. I think the article you're talking about is pulling a bit of a motte and bailey. I read it, and what it claims is technically true. The director of the health institute they interviewed did indeed claim that the cluster definition of sex was a better model, and thought that EO ignored intersex people. The lawyer they interviewed did indeed worry that trans people and intersex people would be hurt by the order. Nowhere did the article actually try to defend "gender" (what I would call "honorary sex"), and there's actually a weird disconnect in the middle of the article. The cluster definition is certainly a defensible alternative definition of sex, but it's not one that seems to easily cohere with the issue of trans people (who would likely still be classed in their biological sex, even with a cluster definition.)
I think they think this is the strongest case they can make in an adversarial environment. Retreat to, "sex is more complex than this, what about intersex people?" and "it will hurt people" - not actually claim anything about the nature of trans people one way or the other.
Cultural narratives that justify social change will do what they will, I have no control over that. LGB activists really enjoyed bringing up gay penguins and the like, even though it reeks of the naturalistic fallacy to me. But the "born this way" narrative really took off, and it was only natural that trans people would try the same rhetorical move. It's the same thing that happened with the anti-cryptocurrency people who recycled the environmental critique and used it against generative AI, even though the amount of energy being used is a drop in the bucket compared to things like airline travel, existing data centers' energy usage, etc.
I think it must always be weird to live through a decentralized social change. Sets of narratives will compete until one that finally wins the day and convinces people bubbles up to the top. The narrative that wins won't necessarily be "true" - just convincing.
I don't care that my "honorary sex" model isn't the one preferred by trans advocates. I think it is the most true model of the situation, until an artificial superintelligence studies humanity and fully explains every aspect of aberrant human psychology one way or the other.
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