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That would never be accepted by the trans activists. Trans women are treated like trans women when convenient, and trans women are treated like women when convenient.
Namely, trans women = trans women when people want to amplify any injustice (perceived or otherwise) committed against a trans woman as an injustice committed against all trans women. For example, the murder of a couple months back of Brianna Ghey in the UK (despite the fact that one of the attackers was a trans woman herself, and there is literally nothing to suggest that it was a hate crime, rather than a fight that got out of hand). In this case, if Brianna Ghey was truly a regular woman, I doubt the case would have made headlines. Therefore, it would be very inconvenient for them to treat Ghey as a woman, instead of a trans woman.
Conversely, trans women = women when people want trans women to have access to spaces usually reserved for females, such as sex-segregated restrooms and sports teams. Sure, the discourse might (d)evolve into hurling accusations of transphobia (in which case it's back to trans women = trans women), but nominally, the conversation always starts with a claim that trans women are women in this respect, therefore they should have access to women's bathrooms and be able to get on women's sports teams. And I've never seen the option of a trans-only sports team or bathroom be much popular with the trans activist crowd. (Although, all-gender restrooms seem to be well-liked by them, but that's not trans-only.)
They want to have it both ways, and hate sticking to one side, because that would mean having disadvantages like everyone else.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what leftists (profess to) believe. I think the correct version is that gender is determined solely by self-identification as a man or a woman (or something else entirely), while biological sex is a private issue that should never be the basis for public policy (which I find problematic but they don't). Biological sex only matters for medical treatment and to label people as "cis" and "trans", but nobody should ever treat anyone differently because their sex doesn't match their gender identity.
Consequently "trans" and "women" are orthogonal concepts. It's no different than race: black/white and man/women are independent. Black women are still women.
It is true that the media likes to emphasize different categories to reinforce certain narratives (this is true on both the left and the right). For example, in the mainstream media a black man is black first if he is killed by a cop, but a man first if he kills a woman. But I don't think that implies leftists can't decide whether a black man is a man or not.
The way it works is that the more minority groups the victim is a member of, the more salient the news becomes. Without the trans angle the story could still have made headlines: "Teenage girl murdered" is still pretty salient, definitely more so than "adult man murdered". None of this implies that leftists think that trans women aren't really women, just that they believe trans women are a particularly vulnerable subset of women, just like black women or lesbians.
No, it's always both. Trans women belong in women's rooms because trans women are women, and denying them access implies you think they are not women because of their transgender status, which is transphobic. (Remember: biological sex is not to be mentioned, so it's always "transgender status" even though that itself is a trivial function of sex and gender identity.)
Again, if you have trouble understanding this just substitute race and it makes perfect sense: if you want to bar black men from the men's room, anyone would point out that black men are men and saying that someone doesn't belong in the men's room because they're black is racist. Those aren't separate arguments; they're part of a single argument.
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What's the source for this? I tried looking it up and couldn't find much information about the attackers (beyond being fifteen year-olds).
Sadly, only hearsay on social media like this LiveJournal and a bunch of TikToks, supposedly originating from kids living near the area who couldn't keep their mouth shut. There's no official source confirming this because official sources are prohibited from naming minors (and places like Twitter keep taking down their names), but it does line up with them being a boy from Leigh and a girl from Warrington who are both 15. In any case if there was a prediction market or something that their names would be revealed to be Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe when they turned 18, I would bet on it in a heartbeat.
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