I thought you were going to end up applying this to transgender issues. You could make an argument that even if someone’s physical body is biologically male, it would still be possible for that person to have an essence which is female.
most arguments that support the claim that trans women are women rely not on Aristotle or Aquinas, but on Wittgenstein. Here’s a paraphrase of Wittgenstein’s reply to Aristotelians like Aquinas.
basically the argument is that all categories, gender included, have blurry borders, and therefore there is no reason to say that trans women are not women just because they lack some allegedly essential properties of women. That’s because the idea of essential properties is an illusion. However when people want to defend trans women’s rights to compete against cis women, they usually retreat to some kind of Aristotelian position by saying “transwomen are women, period”. Even though this Aristotelian/Aquinian position doesn’t really hold up we look at closely, it remains compellingly plausible when we don’t look at it closely.
