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The words woman and man have always meant male and female adults. It's only in the past decade or so that trans-activists have tried to redefine them to be somehow unrelated to biology, for the sake of being able to force everyone to pretend that a man in a dress is actually a woman.
Things were easy to discuss before, transactivists made it harder by trying to forcibly uncouple the words man and woman from what they have always meant.
Well that's fine, but I'm talking about how things should be, not how they are. People should be allowed to choose their gender, because more freedom is better than less freedom. Having separate words for talking about biological sex and gender is useful.
No it isn't, because those aren't separate things to begin with. "Gender" is merely a synonym for "sex". And much like @Crowstep said, there was no confusion on this point until recent decades when activists have tried to redefine the words to point to an entirely new concept. But going by the old (and imo correct) definitions, it is incoherent to talk about "choosing your gender" because that is an objective fact about reality. Perhaps one day we will be able to effectively change someone's sex/gender, but we aren't there yet. So you don't get to choose at our current tech level.
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People should be allowed to walk through walls, because more freedom is better than less freedom.
But, alas.
Sometimes you just want to identify as the Kool-Aid Man.
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Yes, and we already do: Male/female and man/woman for sex, and masculine/feminine for gender. And people are already free to choose whether to be masculine or feminine. Sadly for those who would like it to be otherwise there are hard and inescapable limits on how far gender overlaps with sex such that no amount of changing one's gender will ever change one's sex.
If someone starts a Pretty Dresses And Nail Art Club then there's nothing stopping men from joining. If someone starts a Women In STEM scholarship grant it should be for women, not people in pretty dresses.
I admit to being a grinch-like person, but the fact that trans activism undermines things like scholarships for women is to me the biggest reason to support it.
Does it though? The women's scholarships still exist, and M2Fs are just as easily used as an argument that women continue to be disadvantaged by men than they are an argument that the scholarships should cease in the interests of equality.
Women vs men, whether for or against, is not helped in either direction by conflating women with men. "Women aren't disadvantaged, this man-in-a-dress has done every bit as well as men do without extra help", or, "Women, which includes men-in-dresses, need their own resources otherwise men will have them at a disadvantage". This is just an argument over who gets to wear dresses.
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For what use?
For a world with trans people in them, for one thing. There are a lot of social situations where you must refer to people without being able to look at their genitals or chromosomes. If you don't know if you should refer to that flat-chested, bearded person as a man or a woman, then then these words are have lost their everyday purpose.
Now, if your position is that we should get rid of these words (and gendered pronouns) in everyday use and just use them in medical or sexy contexts, that is consistent, but also not how humans work.
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Why?
It's trivial to identify examples of freedom that are not better the more people are free to exercise them. It's equally trivial to identify ways in which increasing certain types of freedoms in one respect creates direct or secondary tradeoffs in another. Therefore, 'more freedom is better than less freedom' is not a self-proving axiom, particularly on a single metric of comparison.
Are there some specific freedoms do you think that you currently have but wish you didn't have? Alternatively, are there some freedoms you have and exercise, but wish you lived in a society where you and everyone else could not exercise that freedom?
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Does that include the freedom to describe the world accurately, for example, by describing the Wachowski brothers as brothers?
Or the freedom for a woman to get undressed without a man watching?
The freedom for women to compete in sporting competitions amongst themselves without being outcompeted by physically superior men.
Transexuals were always allowed to describe themselves as the opposite sex, and to dress as the opposite sex if they wanted. It's the desire to force everyone else to play along that generated the pushback. There are genuine tradeoffs here, and if we're going to use 'more freedom' as the heuristic, surely we should weigh the freedom of the majority more than the freedom of a tiny, tiny minority?
Yes, that would be free speech.
I think we should try to arrange things so that everyone can have privacy when getting undressed. So yes, I agree with this as a special case of a general policy.
Well, people should be able to freely associate, meaning that if they want to hold a sports event for only biological females, that should be allowed. I don't think they should necessarily receive federal funding for events that discriminate based on sex, however. If the government is going to fund sports, I think everyone should have an equal chance to participate. Which obviously does not mean that everyone will have an equal chance at winning. Sports are not fair, and being female is just one of the many ways someone can be disadvantaged. Why should that be singled out?
Not always, there have been laws against crossdressing in many countries. The US has progressed past this, but some countries still haven't.
I view freedom as absolute, so there should be no weighing involved. I would only describe something as a freedom if everyone can have an absolute right to it. Everyone can have an absolute right to free speech, but it's not possible for everyone to have an absolute right to food or healthcare.
It sounds like you mostly disagree with the transactivist agenda, which makes me wonder why you have bothered to swallow their (obviously motivated) definitions of sex and gender. But it sounds like we mostly agree, except for a few things.
Because if we don't single it out, then female sports literally cannot exist. Women are worse than men at every sport (including things that aren't really sports like chess). The only exception I'm aware of is ultramarathon. Without female-segregated sports, women cannot practically play sports competitively. Whether or not there is federal funding (remember that other countries exist) seems kind of immaterial to this fundamental issue.
You can view or define freedom however you want, but the reality is that real life always involves compromises, tradeoffs and zero-sum situations. We need a way to adjudicate these. Given your own limited definition of freedom cannot apply to most of them, how should they be adjudicated?
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