alt Hacker NewsWe have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
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That ontological classification is a recent invention with almost zero roots in common language. For most people, woman means "adult female".
> When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."
Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.
Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:
“transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).
If we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?
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If you are going to insist ontologically that men are women and women are men then words have no meaning and you aren't ceding any ground at all.