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You can do this, but it doesn’t satisfy either side. The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’ and the progressives get furious that you haven’t defended a non-trivial interpretation of their femaleness. It just progresses the euphemism treadmill.
And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)
Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.
Hows that working out for you?
Just look at the absolute self own for the prog side that one school did recently when they forced a bunch of school girls to be present in the same locker room as a trans student while they were changing, that's after the girls were putting up a stink and walked out previously so as not to be in the same changing room as the trans student.
Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25?
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What's being achieved here? You've proposed to turn 'woman' into an obviously useless appellation that doesn't capture any of the information people actually care about, and then when they pivot to different words you say, 'no, you can't do that'. What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender' but you know perfectly well that loads of people disagree with you on what these contexts are and how many of them there are. Which is how you end up litigating 'trans women' in female prisons and 'trans women' in female sports.
I get into a lot of niche fan/SF/fantasy stuff, so I read a decent amount written by trans people to an audience of (assumed) trans people. This is not how they think. They want to opt out of maleness and into femaleness, they want to be 'one of the girls'. They are very definitely not happy if you call them 'women' as an appellation but otherwise treat them as male.
Yes. Not only do I want to say it, I say it openly and have done so in the past. I got pretty deep in the weeds of trans prisoners in another culture war thread.
As for your second paragraph, you may want to read what I wrote out here.
The problem with 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women' and in turn with defining sex by cluster-of-traits is that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. This means that:
This is why progressives don't usually go for sex-as-cluster-of-traits: you then have to start defining those traits. Upper body strength, height, testosterone, estrogen, propensity for violence, propensity for nurturing, thing-person preferences, womb, penis, voice pitch, clothing, OCEAN scores, pronouns, leadership styles, intellectual interests, hobbies, sexuality, etc.
Many of these traits are obviously relevant to the real world, especially the physical ones and the ones related to desiring women, which is why the biggest battlegrounds have been sports, prisons and shelters for battered women. Many others of these traits are directly observable, which is why people resent being forced to affirm in public that the tiny person with breasts and a high-pitched voice is a man and the big, bearded sysadmin with an anime body pillow is a woman.
So far, progressives have been unable to put together a convincing cluster of traits that doesn't look cherry-picked, doesn't sound conservative and doesn't exclude things that the majority of people think are relevant. This is how you end up with Keir Starmer's famous claim that "99.9% of women don't have a penis".
*I'm not going to cover intersex because there aren't enough of them to matter and they don't disprove the general case. A chicken born with a deformed leg doesn't mean that chickens don't have two legs.
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