Side note: I dislike using "other side" or making it too partisan an issue. I know 99% of people make it a political issue but I'm really hoping that here on hackernews we can discuss this civilly from a more neutral position.
Also: I was merely using “other side” to refer to my friends who hold a differing opinion. It’s an interesting debate, not a war.
Gender can refer to two different things:
“Ascribed gender”: what bucket (or buckets) of the set labelled “genders” by society does society at large (or, in certain contexts, some defined subset of society other than you yourself) put you in.
“Gender identity”: what bucket (or buckets) of the set labelled “gender” do you yourself feel you belong in.
There is no objective set of traits defining boundaries of gender buckets, no objectively correct number of gender buckets, and no objective need for their to be any set of buckets labelled “gender”. It is all path-dependent social construction that varies by social context and individual.
(“race“ works the same way as “gender” here.)
In the sense that “‘race’ can be substituted for ‘gender’ without loss of accuracy in the description in GP”, not “the dynamics of the degree of social acceptance of divergence between ascribed race and racial identity are identical to those for gender.”
My general definition is “adult female human” which makes sense taking into account how “woman” has been used by almost everyone (until very recently). For example, the “women” in “women’s sports” is referring to the sex of the participants, since sports are sex segregated due to biological differences, not gender differences.
I’d also argue that “man” and “woman” are parallel to the words we use to describe other animals, e.g. buck and doe for deer, cow and bull for cattle, etc. They’re species-specific sex identifying terms.
Those I‘ve talked to on the other side treat “woman” as signifying gender rather than sex, so a person who is trying to be treated as a woman socially should be referred to as such.
I don’t see a problem with generally referring to trans women as “women” in social situations out of politeness; the issue of whether a trans woman is a “real woman” only really comes up when the person’s biology actually matters (e.g. “womens health” and the like).
Edit: typos