Is "Which bathroom should this person use" an easy question? If it is really easy, why it is so controversial? You may think it is an easy question, in reality it is an actual hard question.
It's controversial because it's based in matters of fundamental worldview, not matters of unexplored complexity. So, given your fundamental worldview, the conclusion is pretty easy. There's nothing that a council of great thinkers is going to be able to illuminate for us on the question. We know what the arguments are. It's "easy" in the sense that the textbook trolley problem is "easy": there's nothing more to be learned about the question itself. We understand the problem and the arguments on both sides, and a council of great thinkers can pull up Wikipedia for you if you'd like.
Hard questions, as I mean them, are ones where there's a lot of complexity to even reach a potential answer. Google's trolley problems are those where the decision isn't just "flip the switch," it's "should we gather this data" or "should we conduct this experiment" or "should we participate in the market in this way" where there are unforeseen side effects to doing so, and you want a bunch of smart people in a room to try to figure those out and shake out all the complexity in the problem that you haven't even managed to state clearly.
But if you can't decide whether it's better to kill one person by action or five by inaction in the first place, figuring out whether taking/not taking the action has unexpected ethical implications isn't going to get you closer to any answers.
Personally, I don't see a point in sex/gender-segregated bathroom at all. The only segreggation that makes sense to me is sitting/standing (which mostly conincides with private/non-private).
But if we want sex-segregated bathrooms (and AFAIK many governments force that), then there's little point if people can just randomly change their mind about which category they belong to. What's the point of categories then?
> But if we want sex-segregated bathrooms then there's little point if people can just randomly change their mind about which category they belong to. What's the point of categories then?
Categories do not need to be immutable. There are meetups for bikers and redditors and many other categories which anyone may self-identify as belonging to. These people prefer to think of themselves as belonging within those categories for any of a number of reasons, and accepting their choice is generally a decent thing to do, barring a compelling reason to the contrary.
The point of the male/female categories is that a large number of people identify as one of those two genders, and prefer strongly to be recognized as within one of those categories. There are exceptions and it's more complicated than that, but in the common case, that's why the categories have value: people ascribe value to them. If recognizing someone's desired identity makes them feel more comfortable, why shouldn't we? In the case of genders, it's especially important since it's such an important category.
Finally, people switching genders on a whim is a strawman itself. Transitioning your gender officially is a multi-year process, and you face significant persecution and stigma along the way. I don't see why anyone would undergo that unless it helped resolve some acute gender dysphoria.
I agree, but you have to ask yourself, what purpose do the categories serve. It seems to me that th epurpose of sex-segregated bathrooms is two-fold: (1) to make people feel more comfortable, because many have weird hangups regarding intimacy and sex, and (2) to keep women safe. Even disregarding (2), it seems to be a choice between inconveniencing a tiny proportion of the population a bit more or inconveniencing most of the population a bit less. In any case, regardless of what bathroom trans people should go in, it doesn't even remotely start to solve other issues (e.g. what bathroom does a dad take his 4-year old daughter in) which is why I think the whole idea is a huge politically-motivated strawman.
The error you're making in trading off a bit more discomfort for an already-marginalized group against any discomfort for the mainstream is exactly the reason having someone in an AI ethics board who doesn't see being a trans person as valid was a problem.
It's also the reason we need more ethics boards, because it's a common error technical training leads a person to, where we're taught how to optimize for common cases and defend against unusual cases---when the things we use aren't people and don't care if they're considered "common" or "unusual."
We could talk in circles about the details here. The fact of the matter is that those who harass others in bathrooms are already criminals (regardless of gender), and trans people are not overrepresented in those statistics at all, so it's a strawman to imply otherwise.
The fundamental difference that will not allow us to converse well here is that you are intentionally not accepting that a trans person is the gender they have transitioned to.
It's clear that's the case from, for example, you saying "to keep women safe" and very obviously not including trans women in that group. Trans women are women and also deserve to use the bathroom where they will feel safer.
The umber of trans people harassing somebody in the bathroom, or otherwise, is probably minuscule enough, and indeed there are laws that deal with that.
But you seem to be intentionally overlooking GP's main point -- people (dare I say most people, probably) have that strange hangup that they really prefer to visit the restroom with people of the same biological gender.
And before somebody comes back with "at some point people did not want to share bathroom with people of a different race", there was a movement to make people see folks of other color as fully human. There is no movement to make people accept seeing naked people with different genitalia.
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I don't think anyone is arguing seriously that transsexuals should not use public restrooms, period. But which restroom to use isn't quite as simple as "whatever gender they identify with", unless you believe that others have absolutely no say in the matter.
That is polarising. An extreme take. I haven't seen anybody make the argument that trans people should be killed. Just that men should not be able to use women bathrooms. In this case, that's the argument. Turning it into something like that is not going to help anybody.
It’s polarizing only if you accept the you-should-die part one of the poles, which is sort of the problem I was getting at. I would characterize it more as reductio ad absurdum.
"Should we own slaves?" is an easy question. Yet it was so controversial there was a civil war fought over it. "Is global warming caused by humans?" is an easy question (with the data we have) but it is massively controversial.
It's a very easy question, almost all countries have resolved answers for it. They don't all agree, but it was very easy to answer. Many of them have clear, objective standards on how to apply the rules (that people choose to ignore or argue over), though some certainly are determined to make it as fuzzy as possible for their own agendas. You can easily find local regulations addressing this topic pretty easily for most parts of the US and european countries, also some other countries like Japan.
There's also the standard fallback answer for "which bathroom": if you make them all single occupancy, it doesn't matter which one. Sometimes that's the solution used in situations like schools.
So maybe pick a better example of a hard question that seems easy. (Though I get the relevance here, given the decried panelist's history and views)
Hard questions, as I mean them, are ones where there's a lot of complexity to even reach a potential answer. Google's trolley problems are those where the decision isn't just "flip the switch," it's "should we gather this data" or "should we conduct this experiment" or "should we participate in the market in this way" where there are unforeseen side effects to doing so, and you want a bunch of smart people in a room to try to figure those out and shake out all the complexity in the problem that you haven't even managed to state clearly.
But if you can't decide whether it's better to kill one person by action or five by inaction in the first place, figuring out whether taking/not taking the action has unexpected ethical implications isn't going to get you closer to any answers.