@Tandora
Coming back to this
Where we diverge is that to you 'woman' is just a 'word' whereas, 'female' is something crucially important. But, as with so much theory, that is too simple, too neat, too binary, too reductive a framework to reflect reality. In fact, both 'woman' and 'female' are just words, and at the same time, they both mean something important, something material, something that matters in the real world.
You misunderstand. "Woman", "female", "word 😂" - they are all just words. What matters is what they label.
But even then, "what they label" is a tricky subject: material reality exists but the way we label it nevertheless frames how we experience it in quite profound ways. So there are labels which are pretty uncontroversially 1 to 1 with the material reality labelled: "a ball", "grass" etc. Then there are concepts which come into being with their labels: "Truth", "Justice", "The Hogfather", that type of thing. And these are products of culture and may not exist the same, or even at all, in all cultures.
And between the two, there are labels that apply to the world of material things but subdivide or group them in arbitary ways: there is a sex binary and we cannot by a label make a male person female, but we can culturally decide that Man and Woman is enough, or we can split those groups up into subdivisions, or we can decide that some DSDs should be called "Intersex" and treated as such even though the material reality is that they are of one biological sex or the other. We can create groups that cross them as well, but those groups cannot escape the reality that some members will still be materially male and some will still be materially female and there is no science in the world yet that can make one into the other.
Ignoring the Dr U's, India W's and "Legal Sexes" of this world who seek to muddy the water, the word "Female" is attached to one of those material facts, the existence of female human beings.
And those people, the female human beings, because of their bodies, have been born into not just the physical capabilities of the female body rather than the male, but also the social and cultural legacy that Patriachy created for them and that, despite not being in any way a natural outcome of their bodies, nevertheless hurts and limits them both in how they are treated and in how they come to think about themselves, the risks they face and therefore also what they allow themselves to risk.
And so they need to be recognised as a meaningful group, and to be allowed to talk about their experiences and challanges, what it is to be them, how they are hurt or marginalised in ways that are specific to or coloured by their sex and the mechanics through which this happens, and where necessary to have protections and rights and supports that are also specific to their sex to mitigate the challenges that they face because of their sex.
That is what is important to me, not the word "female" but those people, however they are labelled, for all the reasons I have stated.
And there is NOTHING Genderists can do to dislodge that belief and that priority for me because it rests in those material facts and they cannot change. One because it's built into our existence as human animals and is with the current state of applied biology immutable, the other because it happened so is with the current state of applied physics immutable.
They both mean something important, something material, something that matters in the real world.
"Female", "Woman" in the original sense both mean something material.
Does "Woman" in the sense you use it, an factual and disembodied Gender that is not just the ugly remnants of the sexist constructs that Patriachy built so deeply into our culture but something worth honouring and preserving, mean something important? Clearly yes. Something does not have to be materal or even real to be important. I don't believe God ever existed but people still built cathedrals and died in his name and those were real and material.
Is "Woman" or "Gender" material in the sense of a pre-culture, pre-language fact of the physical world? I don't know.
But it doesn't matter. I don't need to know if it is "real" outside the constructions of sexism or not, I only need to know that even if it is "real", it is still not the same thing as being female.
And that is all the distinction I need to be able to say with absolute fairness and validity "No, female people cannot be treated interchangeablly with men who claim to be women because there are many many things that female people deal with that those men do not and this cannot all be subsumed into some sort of mixed sex Gender based on sexist beliefs in the diffence between men and women's characters"
So for "Female". And now to "Woman".
I often say I'm not going to argue about who is or is not a "Woman" because at the end of the day it is just a word, and what is important is that Female people exist and have all the challenges and therefore all the moral rights to be understood to be different to trans women that I have outlined above.
I say this so we don't go down stupid sidetracks about "what is a woman" and "genitals" and "but DSDs" and all that bollocks that distracts with edge cases when the manifest and undeniable truth is that humanity managed and still manages to find a good enough working definition of us to oppress us, and for me the importance of Feminism and Women's Rights is to support those people, so that good enough working definition is going to be exactly the right one for me to use as well.
But it isn't entirely true. I do care about the word "Woman". Not because it has some mystical emotional connect to me such that I need to have it to feel seen as who I am, but simply because all the history and culture of female people ws written under that name, so we need it to understand that link between what happened to us in the past and what happens to us now. It is not fair to break that.
The reality is no trans "woman" was ever denied the vote because he was a woman, no trans woman was locked behind the purdah screen or faced the FGM knife because he was a woman or a girl, no trans woman was ever told as a child he couldn't do something because girls can't do that, no author wrote a story where the little girl who was being told to pack the picnic was a trans girl.
Our history shaped the world we were born into and our journey through life makes us what we are. Our sex and the risks that come with it and how people react to use because of it is part of our journey (both male and female) from the day we are born and
And that matters. Trans women's story is NOT female people's story. It is not fair to us to implictly rewrite our history and our lived reality, making it impossible to tell the real story of what happened to us and why and how that affectes what we face today, simply to valiadte trans women's sense of self however real that self may be to them and materially.