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Notes -
OP does go on to say:
Seems to me the argument is not circular, just compact: without a concrete definition of man and woman, there is nothing to be "trans" in comparison to.
This sort of argument is not new - a common variant is to argue that trans and non-binary are inherently in tension for this reason.
Fair enough. But then isn't this just answered by "man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"? With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases, and then still, the "a man who" argument fails to be convincing. The extended form of the counterargument then is just "you're concluding group membership by using as an argument your choice of group criteria", which is still just as circular.
(This is not a "pro-trans" view: "trans women are women" were just as silly, for the same reason, if it were an argument and not a cudgel.)
The answer to this is that this argument proves too much. If we go by the pre-trans, biology-based definition based on biology and the type of gamete a body is geared towards producing, there are edge cases - but it's the intersex (it's telling how the intersex and language associated with them , "assigned sex at birth" , have been appropriated by trans activists) - but this small minority doesn't render the category meaningless or most biology-based categories - as a start - have to go.
Going by the biology-based definition it's easy to see how intersex are an edge case (which doesn't vitiate the category). It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition - it's not based on dysphoria since some deny that (and lack of comfort with your body doesn't change your sex in any case), not based on intersex-style biological ambiguity since most trans are not intersex, you don't need any brain scans to fit your claimed gender so it's not based on that, you don't need to transition - and then what of women who're non-conforming? Where do they fall? It's similar to the "Trans-Inclusion Problem" and "woman":
You complain about the inherent fuzziness of the biology-based definition of "man" and "woman" but you run a worse issue with "transpeople". You cannot say "transpeople are the edge case" when defining trans in the first place in a concrete way is a problem.
Oh, wow, look: we've basically circled back to OP's original complaint. Like I said: compact not circular.
I don't think the category is meaningless! Certainly, men and women overwhelmingly exist. However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others. And the intersex - but the intersex are much more rare than those! I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.
I think the phrasing "have to go" implies that we either have rigorously separated men and women or we cannot have men and women at all. I reject this line of thinking anyways. A group doesn't have to be total to be useful. I'm sure there are people who argue like that; I don't count myself among them.
Oh, I'll be the first to agree that the vacuous nature of the term weakens the trans case! This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition. This does not however disprove the existence of trans people; it just shows the category is fuzzy - as should be expected of a category defined as category-crossing. A sphere is inherently easier to define than a concave lens.
But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion. I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term. I think the trans movement often fails to make this case, or make it convincingly; that doesn't make "mtf are men because I put them into that category" any better; it just shows the error is widespread and not limited to any side.
Under the biology-based definition, this is meaningless. Taking from societies I know: a girl doesn't get out of wearing a hijab after puberty because her sports-playing makes her more of a boy than a girl.
Not really. Because the gender ideology is hiding the ball here: they created this dualist version of "gender" stripped from sex, and then take every deviation (which is inevitable once you remove the backstop) as proof of their thesis.
Many traditional views and the biology-based view simply don't run into the most excruciating version of this problem that gender ideologues insist problematizes the categories enough to justify their radical changes. "Woman" is both a sex and gendered term, both normative and descriptive, and the sex element is the sina qua non under this view. A woman can act unladylike, but she's still a woman due to her biology. You remove this and then it's much easier (intuitively) to argue that woman is arbitrary or infinitely extensible.
But it is a rewriting of history to act like this is the universal definition. It is, in fact, very contentious. They created the problem by first assuming that gender is totally distinct from sex and then solve it with an even more imperfect definition than the one we have.
In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category - especially if no superior alternative has been put forward. On that point:
And what is this meaningful definition?
I have given you my definition of "woman" and we've plumbed the benefits and downsides. Seems to me that we have to first define "trans" before we can actually settle whether this is a more coherent position than the activist status quo?
I don't see the circularity. And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)
So, until we actually define "trans" are we really having a fair fight?
"what we care about"
I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different. That's why there's little sense in attaching so much meaning to terminology, and why you cannot convince people by gesticulating at genes and genitals. When you say "obviously a woman is", and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is", we use terms that have 99.9% the same coverage, because they almost cleave reality at the joints - which is why the few edge cases are so difficult. In a distribution where almost every property is correlated, it is very hard to see that actually people might be selecting on totally different properties. For instance, since I spend a lot of time online, voice is a dominant criteria for gender for me, and since I'm bi, genitals are a relatively low factor. I don't have the "whatever makes people want to found families", so genes and womb don't factor at all. But you wouldn't see this by looking at what I call "men" and "women", because it's almost entirely the same as everyone else.
edit: In fact, we could probably formalize this into a law: the more dimensions a group correlates, and the smaller the set of exceptions is, the less people will naturally come to agree about group membership of the exceptions.
You're doing it again. I'm obviously aware. But I also said some other things like:
And:
You cannot simply ignore explicit statements that show my underlying assumptions and then claim that my position is incomplete or simply failing to capture some points others care about (in the same manner you ignored elements of OP's post to better call his position circular) because it looks so without the underlying arguments. I know their position. I disagree and have provided reasons why.
I've made my position clear: it's not just what I care about, I find the alternate definitions less useful (in terms of the things we already know societies use sex-gender for like...sports and segregation - anyone can come up with "florgs" as an answer to "what is a woman" but non-private definitions obviously involve the inter-subjective) and even incoherent - and this belief is helped along by the fact that you never seem to offer this allegedly "meaningfully objective definition" that solves the problems I've raised about trans and its associated definitions like gender and woman.
You're not giving me news by saying people care about other things when they define things. I know, I don't care. I simply think it leads to problems and incoherence. I am not unaware that someone could define "life" as including the "joy of living" - nor would I consider it a productive conversation if someone ignored all of the reasons I gave for thinking this to remind me that people can come up with subjective definitions.
You haven't actually given us this "meaningfully objective definition", or any definition. I provided you with my definition of my terms and why I don't think some alternatives work. You mainly seem to want to knock down or critique definitions raised.
Which I admit is probably more fun but I don't see the point in playing this asymmetric game.
And I guess I'm just not very interested in the object-level debate, fair enough. To me, all the difficulty of the question arises from meta considerations, because if I sufficiently communicated why I think the assignments of load-bearing criteria were fundamentally arbitrary, the question would not be answered so much as recede in importance. I think to some extent "cleaving reality at its joints", while a strong metaphor, erases the vital detail of a high-dimensional space with many correlations, so that the axis of the joint is greatly overdetermined - such a thing simply does not arise in three-dimensional space. But I don't know how else I can try to express it either. We're not talking about which way the joint is turning but which sinews carry the most strain, which muscles the most force. Also in this metaphor the muscles are subjective to begin with. I'd say your position is "the muscles in the third and fourteenth dimension are clearly the only ones that matter centrally" and my position is "it depends on how the joint is trained."
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So do I when they're grouped as a sub category to a referent super category, but if we call them women the super category ceases to signify anything essential and becomes effectively arbitrary and correspondingly insignificant. (And when it's arbitrary I have no need to justify my opinion beyond it being an opinion that's mine. Back to square one, the circle created by trans rhetoric travels in both directions despite their intention.)
When I say "transwomen aren't even transwomen" I say it to contrast their own rhetoric and demonstrate their dependence on the binary they (selectively) disavow.
At base my argument is that "men who [choose to pursue and increase their femininity, AKA transwomen]" is legible. Each element points to something distinct even where the element might be fuzzy at the boundaries. "Transwomen are women who want to affirm their gender identity as women by pursuing feminine social signifiers" (the most charitable framing I can come up with) loses legibility the more you think about it as each element circles back to itself until the boundaries it depends on collapse into meaninglessness.
My own belief is that they do this because, less charitably, they are men who [want to be women and throw out these convoluted rationales to avoid the distress of acknowledging that they simply can't]. What they can do is increase/maximise their femininity, which is what they're already doing, and which I can't see anyway of discrediting. It's plausible, it's feasible, and it's legible. It doesn't float my boat, but it doesn't knit my brow either.
And my point is that this argument, ultimately, only makes sense to you because it begins with your choice of the critical definitional aspects of masculinity. You say "men who" because you consider these attributes of manhood as critical, in which transwomen are masculine. But that is not an argument.
I consider those attributes critical inasmuch as absenting them from the discussion leaves us with nothing to discuss, or at least nothing conclusive. Non rhetorical question: How can it be otherwise?
I might be mistaken but your objection seems to rest on "man" operating as a floating signifier that can be either male (sex) or masculine (gender). This is problematic because for transgenderism to be legible the gender has to be associated with sex. A gender that is unassociated with a sex is effectively arbitrary. If transgenderism depends on gender being arbitrary then it can't make strong claims predicated on gender, if gender is illegible then claims on gender can't be understood, and if gender is strict then gender only serves its function as it relates to sex.
I think man operates as a floating signifier covering a dozen axes that are all more or less correlated, which is why it causes debate.
I think the leftist view is that tg depends on gender being arbitrary, which is why they've spent years disclaiming any claims it actually makes.
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