The obvious objections to this seem to be (1) ewww (which I suggest is not an argument)
It makes the women uncofortable. This is the same type of argument you're using that we should endulge the tannys' delusions and there are many more actual women than trannys (by four orders of magnitude and that's assuming current claims are taken at fase value), so do the utility calculation.
and there are obvious risks of harm from trans women trying to use men's bathrooms too.
First, see my comment above about the relative numbers of the two groups. Also, the harm to trans "women" is lower since most men aren't interested at gawking at (or harrasing, etc.) fake "women". The ones who are tend to be gay, which is potentially a sepertate problem, but one that we have either way.
Iand for many purposes someone who looks more or less female,
So is a lion with stripes painted on it a tiger?
presents as female, and considers themself female is "closer" to stereotypical-female than to stereotypical-male whatever is in their chromosomes or their pants.
You do realise this is an empirical question and not just a piece of attire you can where to be "pro-trans"?
Someone in this situation is some way from the centre of either the "women" or the "men" cluster, regardless. It seems to me that in fact there is no such thing as the similarity cluster labelled "women" because (have I mentioned this already?) there are any number of similarity clusters corresponding to different notions of similarity, and different notions of similarity are called for in different contexts.
This is not an argument, it's an appeal to nihilism. Yes, you can arbitarily define a set and declare it a "similarity cluster", that doesn't make it so. This is similar to the psychiatric patient I mentioned above who defined the set consisting of himself, Jesus, and John Lenon, and declared it a similarity cluster.
If you pick some particular notion of similarity based on (say) gross anatomy, sex chromosomes, hormone levels, and ability to beget and/or bear children, then indeed our hypothetical person is in the "men" rather than the "women" cluster.
Not to mention physical strength, a bunch of psychological traits, etc.
But do you really think there's a delusion there?
Honestly, in this case there is probably less delusion and more BS (in the sense of the saying things without caring for their truth value) for the sake of getting another 15 minutes of fame.
four orders of magnitude
I think you're doing the wrong calculation, in two ways.
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.