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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 whomever produces large or small gametes.
People who don't produce any are, in every case, a defective version of one or the other (yes this includes all types of intersex people). There's no example of true hermaphrodites in humans.
Why does that matter? Because the energetic economics of gamete size determine all the higher levels of abstraction over them. Up and including the forms of deceit you'd need to use to play at Diogenes.
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Isn't that the very crux of the issue? The big problem for trans activists is that using woman to describe a trans woman isn't immediately intuitively understood. That's why they need to oppress people into it.
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
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The problem is that transgenders are inconsistent. They'll argue for the strength of definitions when doing so suits them, and for the weakness of definitions when it suits them, and against both whenever it doesn't suit them. They don't care about definitions, they care only about what suits them. They want something they can't have, leaving them to clutch at whatever they can wrest, while ignoring that their taking possession negates any significance.
I'm not sure that I've observed this inconsistency.
What are some instances where you think the definitions are strong, and on trans people's sides that they tend to bring up?
In many ways, the core of my adoptive sex model is one that sidesteps definitions all together. Sure, call trans women "men" if you want - that has absolutely no bearing on whether they're an honorary woman, because honorary statuses exist in the social realm not the empirical realm.
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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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