system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Transgender definitions of a woman (or man) use circular reasoning so don’t make sense as a definition

I know trans posts are overdone here, but I think part of it is because the idea just doesn’t make sense to a lot of people on a fairly fundamental level and people are trying to square that. 

I understand transgender people are in a lot of pain, confusion and distress and I earnestly hope they get the treatment they need. 

The problem for me is that the proposed definitions just don’t make sense so it is hard for me to say someone is *actually* a man or a woman when they clearly just aren’t. 

So to get to my main point, which is purely just about philosophy/linguistics, the general transgender ideology’s definition of a woman is ‘a person who identifies as a woman.’ But that doesn’t make sense? You cannot have the word in the definition too. It’s circular reasoning. What is the meaning of the ‘woman’ then that the person identifies as? I really want to be convinced of this as it’s the only hurdle I cannot get over. 

(Also I will only be convinced by arguments that don’t bring up extremely rare exceptions like XXY people or someone born without a certain sexual organ. Categorisation (in language) is never 100% but in this case it applies to 99.999% of cases so is pretty tight. A few exceptions do not break the rule. It would be like saying ‘a human cannot be categorised as having one head because there are conjoined twins’.)
gpt
>my main point, which is purely just about philosophy/linguistics

It's a very surface level understanding of both philosophy and linguistics. 

Linguisitically speaking, does the concept of "being transgender" exist in the spoken and written language? **Obviously it does.** It exists as much as being a Catholic, or being American, or being psychic, or being white, or being an aristocrat, or being cisgender. 

Philosophically speaking, what does that mean? Well, not much. That the language creates subjective labels, and it is not really an essential revelation of "things that exist" in a material measurable sense, is a very basic observation.