ttytg

I see your point, but I think one has to take the context of the conversation into account too.

In a social situation involving a transgender person, it's considered polite to use pronouns that won't exacerbate any gender dysphoria they may feel. I would think that most of us have done this at some point, as a kindness.

However if we're discussing a controversial public figure, and the topic is sex versus gender identity, I feel it makes more sense to use pronouns that match up with material reality, for the sake of clarity.

I understand the point you are making, but I feel that using a female pronoun while discussing Thomas being male would have been the more jarring linguistic choice, given the subject.

That's all very well in theory, but what classes would you use to replace sex in practice?

For example, in a recent women's swimming competition, Lia Thomas, who is male, was permitted to compete on the basis of his gender identity claims.

Do you consider gender identity to be a reasonable method of categorization? Because that is the specific problematic issue here, not whether different attributes than sex could be used in general.