Something coherent must have clear satisfaction conditions that do not presuppose itself. Traditionally, woman is defined by sex, adult human female. But once gender theorists add gender identity, and distinguish it from sex, the definition seems to change. If being woman is having an internal sense of being woman, this is circular because it gives no information about what is actually being felt or what the category being woman consists of. If the content of the feeling is just feminine social roles, then that regresses into stereotypes which is the very thing proponents of this theory claim to oposse. To begin, could you provide a non circular definition of woman in the gender identity sense that does not rely on biological sex or circular definitions?

Actually, me argument remains intact. Because complexity doesnt also mean coherence. You have not given the definition of the content still. I asked you for it and you ignored it. You gave the mechanics, not the definition. If woman here means a set of social explanations, then "self-positioning" as a woman is simply the act of adopting those expectations. This brings up a logical dilemma, either those expectations are indexed to the biological female sex, (in which case gender identity is just a redundant label of a male’s preference for female-coded stereotypes, or they are not. If those expectations are not linked by sex, then "woman" just becomes "femininity". This reduces motherhood and womanhood to regressive social norms. Furthermore, you have not adressed the issue: The claim that womanhood is a social construct (coordination game) vs the claim that it is innate identity that must be legally and socially recognized even though there isnt't any performance or social coordination. If being woman is brute, unanalyzable internal state, it doesnt have the public criteria necessary to even function as a social or legal category. What is the person positioning themselves as?

This still requires players to coordinate on how to determine these properties or strategies. If woman is the label for this equillibrium, there is still the problem of content. what is the self positioning positionng itself toward? historically, it was biological sex or a specific set of socially enforced roles. If you reject both as the essence, then self-positioning becomes an inner sense of being a category that is defined only by the act of positioning within it. This is still circular. You still havent given a non circular definition.

Now, the main flow is out. You admit "partly sex-linked." if the identity woman only gains intelligible content by reference to biological sex, then the gender-identity layer is not a distinct, coherent category. It is a derivative one that literally relies on sex in which you are trying to separate it from. Thus, if you remove the sex link, there is no complex social kind but a brute, unanalyzable property. Also, fuzzy boundaries are not the same as a lack of public criteria. A dollar is a coordination device because we can all see the physical bill or the digital ledger. An internal sense is purely private. A category without public criteria cannot perform the social and legal work of a status function, because there is no external way for the coordinators to verify the state they are supposedly coordinating upon. You have still not addressed the content problem: what is the specific, non-circular content of the internal sense if it is not "being female"?

Ok, I see your point now. This however brings up newer problems: If these expectations are in biological proxies and historical roles, you have reduced womanhood to a set of social stereotypes. If being a woman is just the equilibrium state of meeting those expectations, then gender identity disappears as an independent concept and becomes a synonym for conforming to feminine norms. You are essentially defining the category through the very stereotypes feminists have historically sought to dismantle. furthermore, if the category relies on public coordinated expectations to be coherent, then an individual's private gender identity would necessarily be secondary to those public patterns. In your equilibrium, if a person does not trigger those social expectations or possess those sex-linked traits, they would not be categorized as a woman. This directly contradicts the core claim of gender theory that self-identification precedes and governs social recognition. You have still not provided the non-circular content of the "inner sense" that doesn't simply collapse into an "internal map" of these sex-linked expectations.