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I'm not really trying to convince anyone that trans women meet the category "men" or "women" I am trying to express that most people I've encountered seem to believe that the actions of trans women are going to much more closely meet the category "female" then the category "male". That might be false, but stating that it is a "fact that trans women are males" disregards even the possibility of examining categories. It isn't an argument or a fact, it is a statement about categories that may be true or false and needs much more detail, namely which features of the categories trans women meet in "men" and not in "women". I think public opinion is swayed by the fact that most trans leaders are very passing where passing is having a large number of visible physical characteristics from the category "women".
We already have a category for people whose appearance and actions pattern match to women: feminine. It naturally favours women but it's very much open to men.
One problem with using "passing" as the benchmark is that it excludes women who don't possess a sufficient number of visible physical characteristics. That's regressive, exclusionary, sexist and all the things that the conflict averse people who suffer no cost in making their opinions public would disavow, it's just that they aren't invited to follow the logic through to this distasteful conclusion. Adding on the characteristics necessary to bring these (non)women back into the category is going to squeeze trans women back out of the other end. That's also regressive, exclusionary, only instead of being sexist it's transphobic. We're left with a Gordian knot of deciding whether this "woman" category should favour qualified males or unqualified females.
So I'm examining these categories and finding that trying to radically redefine them diminishes their utility, which in turn diminishes their significance. Does the examination stop at a point before trans women qualify as women, continue to a point where any human qualifies, or does it conveniently extend only up to the Goldilocks point where trans women qualify and then we should stop looking? Are we trying to describe reality with accuracy or are we trying to soothe trans women's dissatisfaction with the existing descriptions of reality?
Enough criticism, here's something constructive. Men are already free to be as maximally feminine as they can (costs notwithstanding). Under the low accuracy demands of public life they may be sufficiently feminine to pass off as women. Nobody is checking! As the justifiable demands for accuracy increase they will be progressively disqualified. At the highest demand for accuracy they are simply male. But if they can't pass the low accuracy demands of basic public life they can't do an end run around the topic by playing deconstuctionist word games to rules-lawyer their way into inclusion of a category that their presence renders meaningless.
[Parallelise the preceding to trans men as applicable]
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