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The word is meaningless with respect to you. But as long as "that guy is goth" is a statement that is able to update my audience's priors towards- you know. The people you and I think of as goth, the word still has meaning.
I do think you need some level of ability to say "yeah that guy calls himself goth but... he only wears bright colors. So... uh... you know."
But in practice you rarely need to use this, because the guy wearing bright colors doesn't call himself goth very often, and the fact that brightcolor guys 'usually' don't gall them selves goth, means that there is still a lot of specificity in the word goth, even if you religiously humor every bright shirted 'goth's identity.
Similarly the traditional meaning of the word 'woman' doesn't totally break down until 50% of women are men who look and act like men. And this is never going to happen. Don't get me wrong, the worst case scenario for 'woman' as an identity is still pretty bad if you favor the traditional one. But it's only going to be the most fem and fem-aspirational men and a handful of extreme outliers. Perhaps it might eventually mutate further in some still stranger direction, but it's never going to cease to be interpretable as a statistical statement about someone's likely attributes.
Sometimes I am frustrated by this whole concept because.... in terms of wanting the interpretability to hold- that breaks down no matter how you change gender norms. If you call a fully transitioned trans man a 'woman', I still have to deal with the word 'woman' meaning almost nothing relevant to my conception of what that's supposed to entail in this context. Dude this guy has a six inch beard and is made of muscle and speaks in a gruff voice and says he's a man what are you talking about? I do not need to be told he has XX chromosomes and was born with a vagina. I need actionable information please.
But similarly, I do think it's reasonable to treat this like the goth case. "That person is a woman, but, they don't like... have a womb. So... uh... you know."
Though I think its a real dick move to treat them poorly over it.
As for Terfs... I actually model Terfs as the opposite. Most Terfs are pro gender norms. The idea is that- being a woman is a pretty chill deal if you play by the conservative rules, in that you get an exclusion from competing with men on being one. There is some of the "You guys are reifying gender norms" stuff, but I see more of that from the leftist professors posting yet another hot gender take than the Terfs. Terfs tend to be perfectly happy wielding gender norms as a weapon against other women, trans or otherwise, in my experience. I see them more as a spiritual successor of the lesbian exclusionaries of second wave feminism. Though I do think there are more 'real' fears involved with accepting trans women than lesbian women.
Well yeah, you can only have "people you and I think of as goth" only if there's some way to say "this guy calls himself goth, but he's not".
Well, for one the rarity of the cases is small comfort given their egregiousness, we've already had a bunch of sentencing day transitions by absolute psychos who wanted to go to women's prisons.
Another thing is that this is only true because a lot of people are devoted to maintaining the material/biological definition of the word. If self-ID becomes undisputed, I'll be identifying as a one any time I'm accused of sexism, and by then I will hopefully be able to also identify as black whenever racism comes up.
I don't follow. The traditional meaning of the word "woman" does not break down no matter how people act. It's a biological category.
I don't see how calling that person a man is actionable information. I try not to treat people differently based on their sex, and adapt to their individual personality.
I'll grant you that feminists generally play dirty by alternating appeals to equality and appeals to chivalry, but political lesbianism is hardly what I'd call "conservative rules".
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