I'm a newcomer to the party, I read a thread over in AIBU then jumped over here, and I've spent a huge amount of time on various blogs just reading. Bloody buggering hell is pretty much where I'm at.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/05/what-gender-anyway
I thought this was a very good article and has one of the best summing ups I've seen of the issue with gender identity and self identification.
The widely embraced “inherent gender” explanation holds that there is such a property as gender identity, which every individual has, entirely separately from socialised gender roles, which only some people will be conscious of, and of which the individual is the ultimate arbiter. This is in every regard an extraordinary claim. As analytic philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has explained, it is also an incoherent claim, because there is no standard by which anyone’s assertions about their own gender can be disproven: “If we’re unwilling to allow that an individual can ever be mistaken about their gender identity, if we’re unwilling to allow that there might be any objective criteria at all about what it means to be a man or a woman, then claims to identify as a man or a woman become unintelligible.” If no one can say what it means to be a man other than to feel like one, what does it mean to feel like a man?
What I'm getting from this is by their own internal logic, TIMs are not women because their own internal logic denies womanhood as an objective reality.