The philosophical arguments here are really a distraction from the important issues anyway, despite what these philosophers say. These words matter because they determine people's civil rights—not because language has to be structured one way or the other.

It's a common argument in our field that when something occurs robustly in many diverse cultures–in this case, nonbinary gender categories–it has a good chance of being, well, determined by human biology itself.

To give a taste, one of Byrne's arguments is that "woman" must be about genitals because  someone called Mitochondrial Eve a woman.

We didn't have the word count to exhaustively catalog the problems with, for example, Byrne's arguments. But Robin Dembroff did ("...an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan..."):

A great illustration of this is biologists' definition of male/female sex. When you hear it, you'll realize it's just something we made up—though made up to be useful in biology. Like all linguistic conventions, there is no fact of the matter about which conventions are right and wrong.

The claim that only biological (or anatomical) word meanings are useful ignores the fact that most of the terms we use for people reference their social roles—not their biology. This argument suggests they would also oppose an adoptive mom calling herself a "mother."

The assertion that words (like "man"/"woman") must map to objective, physical parts of the world that are "already there” ignores decades of empirical cognitive science studies that show many ways in which our cognitive systems *do not* reflect objective physical facts.