I know you engage with this forum in good faith Bespin, but I think you, and Indigo9 are missing the point, when women here ask for a definition of woman which is subject to practical proof for the sake of policy and legislation.
Women have fought for, specific rights and suffered from, specific oppressions, on the basis of their biological reality. That’s not about feeling like a woman, that’s about the material reality of the female body.
If men are making the claim that they are really women, in order to enter female spaces and take up female spaces, (in rape crisis centres, in women’s sports, on short lists and prizes and hospital wards, for example), then it seems reasonable, indeed overwhelmingly sensible, to be able to identify and measure the quality which makes a man a female person in law.
If women are to experience the incursion their f men, who believe they are women, into their spaces, most often to the detriment of women, then their needs to be evidence, other than an immaterial and immeasurable, innate sense of womanhood.
While I am willing to concede that there are men, for whatever reason of mental health or biological quirk, who truly believe they are, in a spirit although not embodiment, female, there is currently no way to differentiate those men, from the perverts, the dangerous or the just plain weird, who are willing to use this legal framework to force women out of their hard-won spaces; physical, professional, economic or health.
So the question about defining a woman is entirely pertinent and has never been satisfactorily answered.
Women don’t care if men want to wear the accoutrement of conventional feminine stereotypes, we really don’t.
Women care about those legal and moral protections which have been enacted because of those social oppressions which are universally experienced by those inhabiting a body which is biologically female.
We care about 16 year old girls who can no longer be competitive in the sports they have trained long and hard for; or the violated women who can no longer trust in a male-free space in a shelter; or a Muslim woman who can no longer swim in the women-only pool session; or the old woman who can no longer ensure that her intimate personal care is done by another woman.
So until you can answer this central question in a rational way which is testable and replicable, we’re going to keep asking. Women should not have to give way to men, yet again, on the amorphous basis of a feeling.