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I don't think even my proposal was "nice, neat and perfect", but I can touch on why I think well-made categories are important (if not "necessary.")
I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far. Language is a tool for communication, and communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.
It's obviously not a very serious example, but the argument that people sometimes have over "Is a burrito a sandwich?" can illustrate some of the problems. Everyone knows what a sandwich is. Everyone knows what a burrito is. But in spite of "everyone knowing that" there are people who seriously argue that burritos are sandwiches, and people who argue that burritos are obviously not sandwiches. If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.
I agree - Finnster is a man. He's never denied this, and I'm not even sure he's trying to deceive anyone, since he's open about being a cross-dresser. To the extent that he "deceived" me, it was at the same subconscious level that a cloud might "deceive" me by resembling a face.
But I'm not sure your "essential nature" thing gets off the ground. If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.
I think a person should be prepared to put forward their metaphysical commitments. Was Casimir Pulaski, who was "observed" to be a man, lived as a man all his life, and who was only discovered after death to possibly have had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a man? You might say that all his contemporaries were deceived or mistaken, and he simply was a woman with an intersex condition, or you may say he was indeed a man - but either way you can't just wave him away as a weird edge case. Either you know what the essential nature of a man is, or you don't. A single edge case is all one needs to make the case that thinking there's an "essential essence" to something much more fuzzy, in spite of how much we might want the world to consist of nice, neat, and perfect categories.
Categories are imperfect, sure. But what’s being defended by most people against the “trans agenda” is the idea that physical intersexual bodies are a statistical anomaly so small as to be bordering on anecdotal, and that gender dysphoria is a rare mental disorder resulting in a delusion, not an oppressed minority identity deserving of protection.
It follows from that perspective that altering gendered language in laws, issuing puberty blockers and sterilizing children, teaching children about gender identity in socially contagious ways, and issuing punishments for calling a male body in a dress “him” are absurd, cruel, malicious, and tyrannical, and evidence of a malign undercurrent trying to force those with eyes to deny what they can clearly see.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that it became politically relevant that of all the decimal numbers starting with 2, only 2.0 + 2.0 exactly add up to 4.0. Academics start discussing how the vast percentage of numbers which are approximately 2 do not precisely add up to 4. News shows start discussing the “2.3 paradox” nightly, and calling people who focus on 2.25 and below “anti-mathematical”. “Even 2.2 added to 2.45 makes 4.65 which anyone can clearly see is 2/3 of the way to 5,” says one top pundit, carefully reading from a TelePrompTer to avoid misspeaking. New math books are issued to younger school grades to ensure that five-year-old children never again blithely and ignorantly claim that 2+2=4. Pretty soon it’s accepted fact among news-watchers that only the small minority of numbers starting with 2 add up to 4 at all, and anyone who says “2+2=4 is common sense math, obviously true” is to be shunned and possibly fired.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. [Winston’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.” - Orwell, 1984
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Then that also leaves trans people hanging out to dry, since their main argument is "I never felt like/I don't feel like I am my biological sex, I feel like I am the other sex". So what does it mean to "feel like" a woman? Especially since there is a subset arguing that you don't need to feel dysphoria about your physical body and you don't need to 'pass' to be trans - a woman can have a penis! a man can get pregnant!
"Feeling like a woman" means you didn't want to play with boy's toys? You wanted long hair and makeup and to wear skirts? But those are all gender roles, and there's no reason why men can't wear makeup and skirts and have long hair and still be men.
Unless we're going to bite the bullet and say "transgenderism is a mental illness; not feeling like you belong in your biological sex category doesn't mean you are the opposite sex, it is a form of dysphoria like the people who want to amputate healthy limbs" and treat it as such - even if people transition and are legally now female (or male) that does not mean "trans woman is exactly the same thing as a cis woman down to biology", then we're stuck with "well there is no definition of what is a man or what is a woman, so trans people can't 'feel like' a woman since there is no such thing as 'feeling like a woman'" and then where do they go? They seem pretty sure, for all the talk about intersex conditions and not judging on genitals, that they know what being a woman and being a man is meant to be.
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But "gets you so far" means "gets you as far as you want to get in pretty much every case where someone isn't trying to fudge it."
Pointing out that it might fail when someone is trying to fudge it doesn't change that.
Given that about 1,600,000 people in the US are trans and there are various legal standards that rely on gender rather than sex; we do need to define this shit.
If a support only fails under load greater than X where X is a possible load 1/250 times; that shit needs to be fixed.
If a support fails under load when people are deliberately pounding on it trying to make it fail, but otherwise does fine (and if the support failing for one person didn't make automatically fail for everyone else, unlike a real one), what needs to be fixed is people deliberately pounding on it, not the support.
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The words were used perfectly well for hundreds of years, and only really came under fire lately because a bunch of people started demanding to formalise and change the definitions. To me, this seems like a conflict caused by an impulse to precisely define things, and I'm not so sure that resolving it by doing just that isn't simply de facto conceding the point.
I just don't think anyone is confused about who they will and won't spend the rest of their life with, and I definitely don't think anyone will be changing their opinion on whether they will spend the rest of their life with someone based on the gerrymandering of definitions of man and woman.
Should it? Why is it necessary, given those words were used perfectly fine for hundreds of years without one? Why is it actually necessary, other than that trans people want to be considered as the one they are not? What, other than that, was wrong with the way they were used up until this point? Everyone already agreed that a man who lost his penis in an accident was still a man.
When you pass a person on the street, do you know if they're a man or a woman? Despite knowing absolutely nothing about them? Despite never interrogating their internal world or genetic structure, or ever once consciously referring to whatever explicit definition of those terms you might hold? The calculation happens faster than the speed of conscious thought, you know what the stranger is on a deep and instinctual level without even having time to ponder about it.
You might even be deceived, but the initial assessment happened faster than you could even think about it. You know what a man and a woman are.
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