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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.
Calling an adoptive child "my son" is cromulent in the majority of the contexts where it comes up, because a majority of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the term (chiefly, the processes involved in parenting a child) are still highly correlated with the term's usage - and the cases where the distinction matters (medicine, childbirth, cultural/legal distinctions) come up infrequently enough that these contexts typically warrant a clarifying distinction (adopted son), if they're ever mentioned at all.
Calling my wife's mother "mother-in-law" could only be described as unintuitive in the sense that nothing is left to the intuition, because the obvious distinction between objective and intersubjective information is directly encoded in the term.
I'll grant that there are languages and cultures where the same term can be used for "mother" and "mother-in-law", or where it is inappropriate to refer to a ward as "my son", and these use cases feel unintuitive to someone brought up without these linguistic or cultural practices. But I suggest that those languages and cultures arrived at their way of expressing these relationships because some of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the terms in those languages or cultures are also more or less relevant to communication in those languages or cultures. And what's relevant to communication in those languages or cultures has historically been a consequence of many evolutionary adaptations generated by divergent selective pressures, such as geography, resource availability, proximity to other cultures and languages, etc.
I think the extent to which the language is being stretched and skewed in your examples is greatly overstated. Compare with: calling an adoptive child or my wife's mother "my flesh and blood" isn't intuitive, because it's not correlated with the (much more specific) mind-independent facts about reality that this language usually implies. A tenuous argument can be made for the wife's mother, in the sense that a flesh and blood bond is formed through a biological child, but it's indirect enough to be unintuitive. For an adopted child, I can't imagine any usage other than simile or metaphor, which is again indirect enough to be unintuitive. Calling an adoptive child and my wife's mother (with the implied familial relations) "my flesh and blood" is quite a stretch for the language, and we must retreat to subjective experiences (how I feel about the emotional bonds I share with my family) or abstract metaphors (religious covenant) to make sense of it - or maybe it doesn't make sense, and it's a lie.
It is precisely the degree to which the language is stretched and skewed by a non-central usage, relative to the information conveyed by a central usage, that determines how likely we are to permit it into everyday parlance.
With all of that in mind, consider: I've been reading a bunch of your comments to get a better understanding of your model of honorary social statuses, and I think the choice of the word "honorary" adds an implied meritorious connotation that isn't actually present. In my model of communication, languages are locally-optimizing compression schemes for transmitting information, relying on a common set of shared mind-independent facts about reality and presumed-to-be-shared subjective experiences, preferences, and tastes; intersubjective contexts such as culture and law are transforms applied to the language to modify the correlation between terms and the set of objective and subjective information they compress. The primary driver of the evolution of language is communicative fitness, which tends to map more closely to things like efficiency or clarity, than to something like merit. This isn't to say that deliberate linguistic engineering is impossible, or even necessarily unusual; nevertheless, I think a lot of your default examples of "honorary status" are not some top-down special award conferred by society upon the edge cases which then filtered down into everyday parlance, but are instead "close enough" practical communicative terminology that eventually required special intersubjective considerations as the edge cases naturally bubbled up from everyday parlance and encountered gaps, contradictions, and disputes in existing cultural, legal, and societal frameworks. In other words, I think calling this phenomenon "honorary status" inverts cause and effect by implication of merit.
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Calling your adoptive child son and calling your wife's mother mom are exactly intuitive, and perfectly fine for everyday use. They might not happen immediately - the two parties involved have to develop a relationship and a sense of intimacy - but those phrases will be adopted naturally. However when the law and greater society is involved additional distinctions are required, so my son becomes my adopted son and my Ma becomes my mother in law.
And if trans activists had followed that process instead of compelling people to pretend they already had that level of intimacy with a bunch of strangers in wigs, I doubt we'd see the opposition we do today.
Edit: for flow
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