What makes 'woman' a special class in this regard? We wouldn't accept the same kind of self definition elsewhere. I couldn't decide to be a Native American without meeting some external criteria around my birth and life. Nor can I decide to be 6 foot 4 or thin even if I sincerely believed it. Someone who did self define like that would be regarded as delusional.
Is there some principled way to decide what things one can self define as and which one can't?
You are being downvoted but this is also my experience. My grocery bill is up more than 15% like for like (I shop exclusively online so it's easy to track) and more than that in total because of volume increases. My utility rates are up >10%. Housing costs are way up where I live. I would guess my overall baseline cost of living is up at least 10% when you remove the impact from lower commuting and eating out costs.
I'm a vegan and I try to be respectful to non-vegans and their choices but moral decisions implicitly contain moral judgements. If I think eating animals is wrong and you eat animals there is no way around me thinking that you are doing something wrong. I don't need to harangue you about it, which in any case is not at all effective as a method of persuasion, but usually I don't need to for people not to like it. I expect most of the anger towards vegans is because of that implicit (and to be fair in the case of some vegans explicit) moral judgement.
From the perspective of this UK cruciverbalist that's a terrible clue. You can't just clue anything you like and call it a cryptic definition. I would argue there isn't even a proper definition component to the clue since 'poisoned penne' isn't a 'pasta dish' in any normal usage. A fair way to clue this would be to indicate the pun and use normal composite clueing (e.g. anagrams).
Is there some principled way to decide what things one can self define as and which one can't?