More Thoughts on Transgenderism

"But trans women are women".
This claim is hard to make sense of. In one sense of "women" - that is, the conventional, biological sense - this is unambiguously and unmistakeably false. Clearly, trans-women are not biological women, because they're defined in opposition to biological women.
On the surface of it, it seems that this claim would, however, be true according to an ontology which sees one's internal phenomenological convictions as the determinant of one's 'gender', and sees gender as some metaphysically absolute phenomenon (it is a straightforward, unambiguous matter whether one is really female or really male). But this is sketchy in several ways. This ontology is clearly dodgy from a scientific viewpoint (what reason is there to think that this metaphysically absolute, very 'queer' (in the Mackiean sense) property of gender lives in all of us? Where in the brain?). More subtly, if that is the ontology, and a biological woman doesn't have strong phenomenological convictions that she is internally really a woman (in the metaphysically absolute sense), then she is not a woman. And probably most biological women are like this, just as most biological men are like this (https://sexandgenderintro.com/). Sure, it is very probably the case that most biological women would feel extremely uncomfortable and anxious suddenly thrust into a male role, and most biological men would feel extremely uncomfortable and anxious suddenly thrust into a female role, which means that their bodies and their phenomenological 'gender' align in some sense. But this fact doesn't actually entail the truth of the strange ontology (the fact that some of us feel more comfortable and secure with a certain set of social expectations and having a certain body doesn't entail that there is a metaphysically absolute property of gender, and that you either have it or you don't).
The only coherent translation of this talk that preserves at least a little of its original sense is this: that trans women claim to have certain psychological attributes - feelings, tastes perhaps - that are more often (statistically) possessed by biological women than biological men. So what?
The conclusion I draw from this statement's lack of sense is that we're meant to only look at the pragmatics of the statement. "But trans women are women" is an ethical pronouncement - a speech act - which is neither true nor false but is intended to express an emotion: trans women deserve to be treated in exactly the same way that biological women are treated - as if they are biological women. Ethically, I think this is probably right (although obviously there are a whole host of contexts in which it would be foolish to try to erase the distinction between biological women and biological men or intersex people who claim that they are really women in the different, internal sense - not just in the context of biology, but social critique as well (feminism can't stop talking about a difference between people who were born into the female role and people who decided to adopt it much later)).