chlodwig

Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."

So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.

Reminder: a "book ban" is simply when a there is book that is acclaimed by the establishment, available in book stores across America, on the shelves of thousands of school libraries, but somewhere, some school board, or parent group does not want it in their curriculum or a tax-payer funded library. A "book ban" is parents and taxpayers overriding curation the decisions of government librarians.

It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.

Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.

Taking care of a baby can be very social ... as long as the other mother's aren't all at work.

And what exactly are these jobs that are a rest compared to taking care of a baby? Are they actually economically productive or are they bureaucratic fake jobs?

I have noticed that many of my peer parents make parenting more stressful than it needs to be, and don't invest enough in learning techniques to make it less stressful. Like, some parents don't even invest in baby-proofing and then they are constantly chasing their toddler around. But, the first year of baby is always going to be stressful because everything is so new, just as the first year at a brand new job is always going to be more stressful than a job one is highly experienced at.

there should be a team of professional adults

Look up how much housing costs, and how much professional nannies cost, in a location where the software engineer and lawyer are making $500k combined. And you'll need at least two nannies, one overnight, one during the day. I don't think the math is going to work out very well. Also, there are a lot of greedy jobs that don't pay nearly as well as $250k, especially early in career.

It all adds up. On average, daycare in USA costs $18k a year per child ( https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/ ), which is the best measure of the total resources that it takes up, all-in. Median income for a 30yo man is $55k and for a woman $45k. So even with just two kids, the lower earning parent with the non-greedy job is not clearing much if anything over the cost of the daycare.

No, because you have to count all the employment going into running and supplying the daycare, which includes facilities, equipment, administration, extra staff, etc. You have to look at the all-in cost.

I don't want to optimize for the economy... but if I did ...

Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.

The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.

Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...

Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.

If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy.

What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.

In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.

Yea, more dual-income families means:

- Bidding up the price of housing

- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.

- Less general slack for parents to help each other out

- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms

- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career

- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.

The post I was replying to said that free parental leave would allow parents to "give their best to the economy" and reach their "full potential" at the career. To me that implied American work culture and "greedy jobs." (Google the term, there has been a lot of commentary on it).

From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?

Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.

I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?

because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential.

Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."

The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.

I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.

- Extra-staffing of floaters to be able to give staff breaks or handle staff sick days or workers quitting - Taxes - Insurance - Administrative staff to handle billing and compliance - Facilities -- Rent, maintenance, HVAC. Adding to this, the facility might have to use expensive first floor space because the regulation requires them to be able to easily evacuate kids who can't down stairs on their own. - Profits/Owner-operator salary (anyone who can own and operate a successful high-quality day-care with five classrooms could command 6 figures salary on the private market)

Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?

That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.

I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.

That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.

I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.

But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare

Game Of Thrones

I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.

Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.

You are conflating social trends among young people to identify as gender non-confirming for social clout, with adults who have intractable gender dysphoria.

It's not just me who is conflating them, the official medical establishment doesn't treat children much differently these days. Zucker was canceled, "watchful waiting" or "reparative therapy" is officially condemned by the APA. "Intractable gender dysphoria" is not something that can be reliably or objectively diagnosed a priori. A relative of mine who has transitioned their son, partly based on medical advice, partly on the advice of adult trans friends, seems to repeating arguments about it being a fixed property and affirmative care being the only approach. Now, I personally do not think this boy has dysphoria at all, he sees a perfectly normal boy to me, he just liked Elsa and princess dresses as a kid because Elsa is a super-stimuli character. But that's not what the medical people say.

You can't separate the kids and adults issue because the most powerful activists who are making policy and getting people canceled are not making a proper distinction themselves.

You can't separate the kids and adults issue because there was a direct road from redefining the words "man" and "woman" to the medical "experts" like Diane Ehrensaft, cited by NPR and NY Times telling parents to not tell their four-year-old things like: "you have a penis, you can never grow up to be a woman or get pregnant, you will grow up to be a man, you are a boy."

It's not the sensationalist headlines that is making me freak about this, it's seeing my own relatives sending a little boy down the path where "continuity of care" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0V0PXrezHM ) will lead to having his penis cut off like Jazz Jennings -- https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-j... https://x.com/SJWilliams123/status/1654534161015635973

I don't know the best way to accomplish that - maybe do some research and read some stories of transgender people published prior to 2015 before it became the political fight du jour.

I have, but you need to re-calibrate your understand for the recent situation. The people who transitioning now are not exhibiting the same types of life stories as those who did thirty years ago. It seems like a different phenomena, and I am much more concerned with the phenomena now, when if afflicts so many people, including parents I know who are transitioning their kids, than I am about the phenomena 30 years ago.

You've gone from demanding randomized controlled trials to referring to random comments from anonymous users on Reddit about how lifting weights cures gender dysphoria?

Yes, once you have anecdotal evidence of something working on a n=1 approach, the thing to do is expand it to an n=many RCT. That hasn't been done. It should have been done. Also, comments on niche subreddits inhabited by relatively normal people are some of the best anecdotal evidence you can find. Anecdotes from friend groups are limited in their own way. Popular memoirs and newspaper stories are both highly selected and filtered by publishers for preferred narratives, and the person writing them understands that a lot is at stake and they have to be careful about how they narrate their story. Random commenters on niche forums have much less incentive to lie (this doesn't apply to big forums where people will lie to get rise out of people, and the comments that reach visibility are selected).

There is zero evidence that your "common sense approach" works at all, and there is zero evidence that reparative or conversion therapy works at all for those with legitimate gender dysphoria.

Clinical psychologists Kenneth Zucker's work in getting the majority of his patients over their dysphoria is "evidence" that reparative therapy works -- https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-r...

Every random comment on Reddit that "I suffered from dysphoria and then started lifting and doing masculine things and got completely over it" is evidence that reparative therapy works.

It's not gold standard evidence, it's not proof-beyond-a-reasonable doubt, but it is evidence. But the "evidence" for "affirmation" and "medical transition" do not meet this gold standard either.

With medicine, the burden of proof is on the person doing the intervention. "First do no harm." Social transition and medical transition are both MAJOR interventions, the burden of proof is on the proponents. "You have to give people this drug, no we have never done a controlled clinical trial on it, but you have no evidence that NOT giving them the treatment works." What? You need to do a RCT before promoting a new treatment as the standard of care. "Affirmation" has never proved itself in an RCT so "Sorry, you are a man" should be the default.

I do not advocate routine genital check for office workers. The crucial questions for me are the following:

1) should institutions that have female only spaces or events be allowed to exclude pre-op transwomen? Post-op? For example, the women's only nude spa in Seattle that got in trouble for excluding a transwoman -- https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...

2) If a coworker of mine who I know to be a biological male (he has sired children, etc.) socially transitions (no surgery), should I be forced to call him "she" and say that he is a woman? What if he makes almost zero effort to pass as a woman? What if he medically transitions?

3) Should I be able to make an argument on social media (Reddit etc.) such as "Men cannot get pregant" or "trans women are not real women" without getting banned for hateful conduct?

All three of these things are really happening, and are the real issues getting me freaked out (also, that and transitioning kids who very obviously are not "girls in a boys body")

I'm a bit confused as to why you are pretending that the word "gender" and the concept of gender either doesn't exist or is part of some very recent flimsy social construct. The concept of gender being used to categorize things as male/female/masculine/feminine is not new, and the concept of gender roles being used for general (not rigid) categorization of male and female traits is not new, either.

I said 'gender identity' not 'gender'.

Up until the early 1900s, the word "gender" did not apply to people. It applied to words. The word "libro" has a masculine gender, but obviously the object itself has no gender or sex. Rarely, "gender" was a synonym for sex, but this was generally considered to be informal or a mistake. As Henry Watson Fowler, a teacher of English usage, wrote in 1926:

"Gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine gender, meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder."

Then in middle-1900s academics began defining gender in various new ways. Money used it as a word to describe the way a person presents their sex. Other academics invented the term "gender role" to describe the things a culture associates with men and women. These academics did not believe that "gender" was some innate characteristic of a person's mind. In fact, many of them were arguing there was no difference between men and women in the head, and "gender" roles were social constructions. Even here, though, the concept of gender applied to things, not to people (eg the gender of pink clothes is feminine).

At the same, time the word "sex" began to more commonly be used to refer to coitus, and so normal, non-academics started using gender more commonly as a synonym for biological sex to avoid using the word "sex."

Then in the last thirty years, the term "gender identity" has arisen to describe one's own internal sense of being a boy/man or woman/girl in one's own mind (see the genderbread person), and furthermore the claim is that this is immutable and if there is a conflict between your "gender identity" and biology or how society sees you, it is your biology and/or society that should change. It is only in the last thirty years that people are considered to have something called "gender" that is different than biological sex.

Interestingly this new sense of "gender" almost seems to be a mutant child of the two, completely separate previous definitions of the word gender (gender as biological sex, a property of a person, man or woman and gender as ones presentation and expression more masculine or feminine).

I do not believe that "gender identity" is a meaningful concept. It is an anti-concept, it mashes together unlike things and makes it harder to think and reason about the underlying phenomena. I do not believe that someone has a fixed gender identity that can be distinguished from their biological sex. I do not believe believe that "gender" (as opposed to biological sex) is a property of a person.

"I am a woman, but I don't always like to act or dress as a stereotypical woman, my self-expression is fluid" is a banal and unobjectionable statement.

"I don't like to act or dress as a stereotypical woman, therefore I am not a woman, my gender identity is genderqueer/non-binary" does not make any sense. It is making a mishmash of concepts.

If you believe the modern idea of "gender identity" is real and valuable then you need to properly define it, explain why it is useful, and what is your evidence that it really exists.

We don't need a mind reading machine to understand what gender dysphoria is, because gender dysphoric people tell us what they are thinking and feeling

It's not this simple. For one, lots of people are all kinds of confused. There are people who think they are dysphoric, transition, then realize they totally messed up. There are people who say, "I went through a period when I was a kid where I was a tom-boy or told my parents I was the other sex -- thank goodness this kind of ideology wasn't around then because I could have been trannsed. I'm perfectly happy in my biological sex right now." If you read a lot of stories they aren't necessarily "dysphoric" they just think it will benefit them someway to transition, in the same way a weightlifter who goes on steroids is not "dysphoric" about his body, he just might think he is happier to be muscled up.

And we also have people who later admit that they lied about the nature gender identity in order to get sex change drugs and trans people who admit there is substantial political pressure to make their personal testimonials about gender identity conform to a certain script: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biologi... https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/

Because we do not actually have the technology to turn a man into a female (or vice versa), I think the most honest and best course is to tell that person, "Sorry, you are not a woman, and the surgery you are asking for will not actually get you want you want. Cross-dressing and wearing lipstick does not make you a woman. But if you learn to accept who you are, you can live a happy life." To be convinced that this common sense approach is not the best approach, I would need very strong evidence -- at minimum multiple randomized controlled trials by honest researchers.

What is "gender identity"? What is the evidence that "gender identity" exists, outside of my identity as a sexed being (ie the influence of hormones on my brain and psychological development, the knowledge of my own body)? If such a phenomena as "gender identity" exists outside of biological sex, why redefine words like "she" and "woman", which have always referred to biological sex, instead of coming up with new words to refer to gender identity?

I am having a much harder time finding that objectionable in the same way as I found what I understood the scenario to be. I'm not saying I'm for it, maybe there needs to be some third solution so people aren't uncomfortable,

Part of the question is -- do you think society needs to distinguish between male and female? Should we have any single sex environments? Should all gym showers be coed like Starship Troopers? Should all prisons be co-ed? Should college freshmen being assigned roommates be assigned male and female pairings? If I, a man, tell my wife, "I made a new friend and we are going out for drinks tomorrow", should my wife care if this new friend is male or female?

And if you say yes, society does need to distinguish these things, is the essential matter for needing to make the distinction "how this person identifies" or "the person's actual biology"?

The transgender stuff is downstream of the modern trend to downplay all distinctions between sexes and eliminate sex segregated spaces.

I think you should look into concepts like "nonbinary" and "genderfluid"

I have. Perhaps my Mike example was bad, because I agree that most transgender people in 2024 are not lying or crazy.

I think the entire concept of "gender" being separate from "sex" is an anti-concept. I think nonbinary and genderfluid are anti-concepts. The purpose of words and concepts in a languages is to group natural kinds together for the purpose of common knowledge and communication. An anti-concept is something that groups unlike things together, that confuses and makes it harder to think and communicate about the underlying natural kinds.

Claiming to be "gender fluid" is pure nothingness, it communicates nothing real to me. I wouldn't actually care too much if "gender fluid" was created as a new concept with its own name, but it is a problem that "gender fluid" overrides and eliminates the concept of biological male and female, which I do care about.

Part of the problem is the word "gender" which originally was purely a grammatical term but since has been given about a half-dozen different directions.

If "gender" refers to the degree that someone acts and presents according to societal stereotypes as masculine or feminine, obviously we are all "gender fluid."

If "gender" is simply a synonym for biological sex, which is its most common use (I blame Austin Powers for ruining our ability to use the word "sex" on questionnaires), then "gender fluidity" is obviously false --there is no such thing in humans or mammals as being fluid in biological sex.

Either way, then, someone declaring themselves "gender fluid" is just nonsense, depending on the definition of "gender" it is either false or it applies to everyone.

It also matters when being "gender fluid" is not just some personal oddity that I can joke about, like someone being into astrology, but is treated as something I must respect and if I don't, I get fired or banned from events for code-of-conduct violations.

Going back to my Mike example, perhaps a better example would be, imagine my co-worker Mike has a picture of a girl on his desk, and talks about being a "dad" and has a "girl dad" t-shirt and when I'm talking about being a dad, he chips in with "ah, in my experience as a dad blah blah blah" ... And then I find out that the "child" he is a dad of is one of these "adopt a child" charities where he has never met her and sends her $30 a month to this girl in a foreign country and writes a letter once a year. OK, that's nice and all, but you aren't really a dad. Now Mike may not be lying or delusional. Be is participating in a campaign to redefine the word and concept of "dad" in a way that confuses rather then clarifies. He also is to some extent "stealing valor." And I object to that and I would object being forced to participate in that.

The RCTs that validate your assertion (or mine) when comparing reparative therapy and affirmation do not exist. All that we have to rely on now is the overwhelming consensus among medical and mental health professionals, and that consensus appears to exist among major reputable bodies worldwide, and is based on their many decades of collective clinical experience and research.

If medical bodies are changing guidelines without basing on it solid studies and evidence, then those medical bodies should be considered compromised and corrupt. Especially when that treatments involving treatments that will permanently sterilize minors. If they are not following the evidence, then they are not "experts" or "scientists" they are ideological fanatics wearing the skin-suit of science.

In following the transgender issue, what I have noticed is that doctors who take the common sense approach, "Your child has a penis, he is a boy, you need to reinforce that and he will get over it" don't make any money. They do not open "gender identity clinics" because there is no money in dispensing common sense. The doctors who tell parents to "let the child explore their gender" and "let's help solidify their transgender identity" prolong the problem and create a recurring revenue stream for themselves. Then, because these doctors are the "head of a gender identity clinic serving thousands of children" these same doctors are the one's who are put in charge of writing the standard of care and the guidelines. It is totally perverse set of incentives.

I'd recommend reading up on how the sausage is made in coming up with the "consensus":

https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/gender-medicines-citatio...

https://www.nysun.com/article/leaked-files-from-influential-...

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "other cases" that are directly comparable with gender dysphoria, and can you find some studies that support the effectiveness of this approach?

If someone was too short, or too tall, or thought they were black (even though they were unambiguously white),

You appear to start from your biology and work backwards, as if the mind does not exist.

No, I don't believe that mind and body exist as wholly separate entities. This is very obvious in the case of sex where the hormones emitted by my testicles very clearly have all kinds of effects on my mind.

It's actually really difficult for me to understand how a person's fundamental well-being is intrinsically and immalleably tied to names and clothing. > > What you are saying here is that "this is my experience and I do not understand why everyone else does not have the same experience".

No, what I'm saying it is difficult to even see how an immalleabile tie between well-being and wearing a dress could have possibly evolved, when clothing has been so different throughout human history and people are thus obviously very flexible in the type of clothes they can wear.

What you are saying here is that "this is my experience and I do not understand why everyone else does not have the same experience". Do you not see a problem with that?

Until a mind reading machine exists, that is all that any of us can do. I have read various accounts of trans-people's experiences and I am not convinced that there is some immalleable preference in their mind that makes them female internally. Certainly some men have a very strong desire to act out the role of female, but that is different there actually being female in the brain. But because of the way various medical guidelines works, and the law works, there is incentive to lie about this.

I don't understand the focus on someone, in your view, lying to you - I suspect we agree that in the scenario you described, it seeming that the person has lied to you about what's in their pants is much less important than the fact that they whipped it out in front of your family. It wouldn't be any better if a man who identified as such snuck into the changing room and did the same thing. I think focusing on criminal behavior is similarly focusing on an edge case

No, under transgender ideology -- "transwomen are women" -- the MtF trans-woman being naked, penis-and-all in a locker room is not a crime. In fact, states that have fully adopted this ideology have made it illegal to expel that trans-woman from the locker room. It is this ideology that I reject. See for instance: https://reduxx.info/korean-womens-spa-forced-to-erase-biolog... https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...

What about this more likely scenario: If this co-worker never did such a thing, they were a perfectly pleasant and normal person to work with, and you only found out they were trans after you or they had left the company and you no longer worked together, would you still be angry they had lied to you - why or why not? Would whether they'd ever gone into a changing room in your presence affect that anger?

Imagine I had a co-worker "Mike" who said they were married, told stories about stuff their wife does around the house, etc. I sometimes asked them about their wife, I told other people, "Oh, Mike, yeah, he's married." Then after he leaves I find out beyond a reasonable a doubt that he was not married, he had been living alone the entire time, etc.

I wouldn't exactly be angry with Mike, I may even have some pity for him, but I would be wary of him going forward. If I met him, I would be polite, and I would neither affirm anything he said about his wife nor would I make a stink about it, and I would try to limit my interactions because I simply could not understand his mind. Was he lying? Delusional? A story-teller? I don't know but it's not really worth it to me to find out.

So it would be the same with the trans person I meet later on. I would simply not use the person's pronouns, I would be polite and neither affirm nor deny their status. I would be wary and limit my interactions because I would, charitably speaking, lack of a theory of that person's mind, and it would simply not be worth by time, energy, and risk for me to try to navigate the situation without getting myself in trouble.

This also is not true. There are numerous well-documented cases of trans people throughout history, and there are long-standing concepts of "third genders" and others dating back thousands of years (see e. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender#Old_World).

There is a big difference between a third gender and a man saying, "I'm a woman because I say so" or "transwomen are women." Eunuchs, eg, were not women, and were not considered to be so. If we want to say that cross-dressing men are a "third gender" that is more acceptable to me than saying they are women and entitled to all the rights and privileges of women and you are fired or cancelled if you say otherwise.

I also should have qualified, as saying "novel in the history of successful societies." Societies in their late stages of decadence and decline have done all sorts of crazy things. Emperor Elagabalus was perhaps "trans" but that was always considered as crazy and bad behavior.

Psychotherapy is simply not effective at changing someone’s gender identity or ameliorating gender dysphoria. The established treatment for gender dysphoria is to align the person’s gender identity and gender expression.

Can you find a randomized controlled study where the "affirmative" approach of aligning gender expression with identity has been compared to a "reparative" approach of aligning identity with biology? I have read a lot of studies on this and what you are saying simply is not backed by the evidence. Whenever I read a study that has been referenced on NPR or such, I read the details and the details do not support what the people citing the study say it supports.

In all other cases, if someone's mental conception of themselves was not aligned with the biological reality of their self, we would say the default is that the person should try to adjust their mental conception. A treatment that involved all of society changing, or even more extreme -- actual removal of body parts -- would need to pass a very high burden of experimental evidence. From what I have read, that burden of proof has not ever been close to being met. There are no studies that say that aligning gender expression works better than helping the person cope with or get over their dysphoria. If I have missed such a study, I would like to read it.

Do you feel that your gender identity could be changed using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

I do not have a gender identity and I do not have a gender. I a sex and I have an identity as a sexed being. I have a brain that has developed under the influence of testosterone, I have the knowledge of having a penis, I have the knowledge that society sees me as a male and penis-haver and all that entails. I have the knowledge that if I used a woman's locker room and exposed my penis, women would freak out, and so I do not do that. Etc. etc. I wear the clothes that I do because that is what society expects of me. There are all sorts of clothes and outfits from other cultures that I prefer aesthetically but I don't wear because they do not align with the norms of my current culture.

It's actually really difficult for me to understand how a person's fundamental well-being is intrinsically and immalleably tied to names and clothing.

Of all the possible forms of clothing humans have worn in the last ten-thousand years, only a tiny sliver of those clothing are socially acceptable for me to wear. And yet we all deal with that.

If someone were to intentionally call me the wrong name, while everyone else gets called the name they have asked to be called, that would bother me, but only because that is a power move that singles me out. If I were to, say, join a fraternity, where everyone had to have a name assigned to them, that would not bother me, and I would be fine being called that name while hanging out in the fraternity.

If someone were to call me a "woman" I would be upset because it is the reality of my biology that I am a man. Furthermore, saying you are a "woman" is usually saying, "You lack the positive qualities we usually associate with being a man -- you are weak, you are cowardly, you are whiny, etc."

It's more like someone telling you to call them John and you call them Tyler instead. It's literally just a word.

That's an absurd comparison. Names are something that have always been personally chosen. "He" and "she", "man" and "woman" are words that create common knowledge about the nature of reality.

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Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao. Zhao Gao gained military power as a result of that.

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How hard would it be for you to call a "deer" a "horse"? It's just words.

Why did you change the words that I used? I said "strategy" for a reason. True intersex conditions (where the strategy is ambiguous) are vanishingly rare.

With humans, there is only male, female, and for lack of a better term, very rare birth defects. We say that arachnids are "8 legged species" even if due to birth defect a spider is occasionally born with 7 legs. We say a coin flip is a binary "heads" or "tails" even if there is a vanishingly rare chance it could land on its side.

This whole "what about people with intersex disorders" is total sophistry. If it was just people with intersex disorders, this would not be an issue. The issue is people who are very clearly one sex demanding to be treated as the other sex. The issue is publicly teaching children that it is possible to change sex.