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This was a misspeak on @aqouta's part, they meant discrediting the concept of certain categories, i.e. the ones that would place "trans women" in the "women" category.
I do agree with them that there is a certain game that's always played (and is a bit tiresome) where people attack a definition by pointing out edge cases. It's like, you say that men are born with a penis and women are born with a vagina, and then they point out the existence of intersex people who may be born with an amalgamation of both or neither.
Well, so, what if those people exist? Does that mean that it's wrong to use the category of "men" and "women"? I personally find no problem with using those categories as-is and going about my daily life with much bigger concerns to deal with than where I should properly place intersex people in my mind.
And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.
The reality is, you can't expect people to give a tight, locked-down definition of anything, much less what a man and woman are. All they can do is give a general overview by a common case, maybe describe a few exceptions here and there, but certainly nothing that would stand up to infinite philosophical scrutiny.
And really, it's pointless, because the trans skeptical are simply not going to categorize "trans women" as "women", even though trans women share more attributes of women than most men share attributes of women. The reason for this is simple: They still simply share too many attributes with men, and we are not at an advanced level of technology yet to completely patch them out.
A trans woman has a penis - well, okay, so then they get gender reassignment surgery. But now a trans woman has a hole in their groin that must be kept open by dilation. Sure, a trans woman wears a dress or a skirt, maybe did some voice training to talk more feminine, grew out their hair, is interested in girl things. But a trans woman still has a male bone structure, male bone density, male facial features, male puberty (no, you cannot just "choose your puberty", that's a whole other rabbit hole that's just wrong), etc.
A trans woman has a whole host of very male-like things that can't be faked or changed as easily as their social characteristics.
Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary. If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.
In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.
I mean, sure, it does that. But that doesn't necessarily mean the definition is wrong and needs to be tossed out. Oftentimes I see these edge cases pointed out by trans activists to argue in favor of a definition by self-identification (which is arguably even more wrong than "penis = man, vagina = woman").
I think most anti-trans people are in-principle like this too. If we lived in a magical transhumanist future where a man could genuinely become a woman, 99.99% of the time an anti-trans person today would see her as a woman and the question wouldn't even cross their mind as to what sex she is because she's unambiguously a woman. There'd only be a few nutcases who'd care too much about her past history as a man and would be very principled about that, but the case for trans people would be exponentially stronger than it is today if actual transition actually existed. Most anti-trans people don't have all this figured out though and when they see a trans woman, it just looks like a man to them, therefore their argument is that the trans woman's sex-based traits are immutable (which, today, is completely correct).
I feel like a lot of trans debates is obscured by a refusal to acknowledge that transition today with current medical technology is actually, really shockingly primitive.
Sure, we can carve out edge cases in the law for those people too. But the general definition should still remain.
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But it doesn't work. There are indeed such traits, and any exceptions are so rare you can safely ignore them. All categories related to things existing on the physical world will work this way, only Mathematics offers perfect definitions.
Further the intersex edge case is useless for trans people, unless you wish to claim only intersex people can be trans.
Surely you can recognize the contradiction in this sentence. "Yes there are traits that perfectly sort humans into binaries, with exceptions."
I don't think this is true? I'm pretty sure our categorization of the elements requires that they have only a specific number of protons, for example. If an atom has eight protons it is Oxygen and if it has nine it's Fluorine. There's no such thing as "Oxygen with nine protons" or "Fluorine with eight protons."
I would recognize the contradiction, if that was the sentence, but if you scroll up, you will see you used the word "neatly" not "perfectly".
Chemistry or quantum physics isn't my domain, but knowing life I'm pretty sure a sufficiently motivated post modernist could deconstruct the category with some " what even is a proton" gambit.
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