Personally I wouldn’t take it as a justification. The sanskrit meaning of ‘part, section, division, chapter…’ is far more prominent. Just to give the variety, yes it can mean the trunk of a tree, but also a bough, a prince, a lake, a teacher, an agreement, and most importantly the ‘equality of height in the humps of a pair of draught oxen’ 
Just to throw another connotation into the mix - considering that the khandhas are
more or less the consecutive elements 2-6 in the dependent origination, I would see also the possibility of ‘coating of grasping’ or ‘layer of grasping’. This would be of course not a literal but a specific functional translation.