The movement for gay rights effectively severed a person’s self-identified sexual orientation from biology, and the identificationist is pointing out that if we are going to do that, then to be consistent we will have to sever one’s self-identified sex from biology. If appeals to biological function cut no ice in the one case, neither do they cut any ice in the other.
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As I suggested in my posts on Byrne, the reason that identificationists take the extreme position they do is that they perceive that the distinction between sex and gender is not in fact a sharp one. The more robust the biological distinction between the sexes is, the less plausibly fluid gender is. The more fluid the distinction between the genders is, the less plausibly robust the biological distinction between the sexes. Hence if you are going to insist on fluid gender differences, you are going to have to deny robust biological sex differences. The identificationist transgender activists can plausibly say to Kaufman: “We are not the ones positing a radical Cartesian divide between persons and their biology; you are! It is precisely because we see persons and their biology as continuous that we conclude that, since gender is socially constructed, so too must the biology of sex be socially constructed.”
If this is right, then the identificationist is not, after all, committed to a kind of Cartesian divide in human nature, but rather to a kind of biological anti-realism or social constructivism. The natural law tradition, meanwhile, is committed to a robust realism about human biology. So, who are the ones positing a radical Cartesian/Lockean/Kantian divide in human nature, then? Defenders of the middle ground liberal position like Kaufman, Stock, and Byrne, that’s who!
