[chlodwig]

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.

[Tainnor]

> Societies in their late stages of decadence and decline have done all sorts of crazy things.

So we have you on record saying that traditional Native American societies like the Zuni were "in their late stages of decadence and decline"?

[ivraatiems]

> 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...

The way you wrote your example, I didn't read it as "the person happened to be naked near my wife and child," I read it as "the person purposefully exposed themselves to my wife and child intending them to see it." It's not normal changing room etiquette to present your genitalia to people forcefully or purposefully and it could be a crime of assault even if the person had the same genitalia as the offender. Did I misunderstand you?

Assuming you actually meant "a person was incidentally naked around my wife and child and a penis was visible for a moment," 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, but I'm not seeing it as harmful in the same way an open sexual assault would be. Is the concern that trans people will commit assault, or is it that they will be present at all?

> 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.

I don't agree that this example with Mike is an apples-to-apples comparison. You have a mapping in your head of "wears dresses and skirts and makeup and long hair, must have a vagina," and I just don't consider that mapping to be valid. Here's a counter-example that I think is more accurate to the situation:

Your colleague Mike wears a ring on his ring finger. He has many photos on his desk of himself with a woman about his age, in which they are hugging or in funny poses together. He refers to her as "Alice" and he mentions her frequently. You assume that Mike is married, and Alice is his wife. For years you and Mike talk about Alice together and he never quite says anything to dispel this, nor do you ask.

Years after you work together, you find out that Alice is Mike's sister, and the ring is a family heirloom. Mike is not and has never been married and is confused and maybe grossed out at someone's suggestion that he's married to Alice.

Did Mike lie to you, or did you just make an assumption about him that wasn't accurate?

There seems to be this fundamental expectation that people will organize and present themselves in a way that allows you to map them into the categories you have in your head. When people don't fall neatly into those categories, it seems like you treat them as incomprehensible at best, purposeful liars at worse, when the reality is that all assumptions are just assumptions and there's no reason not to just be like "oh, I made a wrong assumption" and then move on.

> 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 think you should look into concepts like "nonbinary" and "genderfluid"; all of these things exist along a spectrum of "trans" identity and they're not as distinct from each other as you consider them to be. The "third gender" example is only one that I supplied for convenience. There are plenty of others. The point is that gender is not an immutable concept.

Honestly, if I had to sum up one overall point over these comments, it feels like I'm saying "gender is not immutable and doesn't need to be" and you're saying "yes it is and when people try to make it otherwise it's disturbing." I'm having a lot of trouble understanding that perspective.

[chlodwig]

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.