Traditions are almost always solutions to a problem. To change tradition we have to analyse the problem the traditional rule solved.

The reason why we have we separate bathrooms and locker-rooms is because there are two groups in society: one with dicks and one without dicks. The problem is that people with dicks can penetrate people without dicks. Obviously, not all people with a dick will do that. Even if the probability is small, the utility cost of unwanted penetration is so catastrophic that dickless people don’t want to be exposed in spaces where there are people with dicks.

A solution is to have two separate spaces. One exclusive for people without dicks and one where you can have either.

I agree sexual predation is an overblown concern; my primary concern is that total unrestrained integration with society will exacerbate existing biological sex disparities:

- trans women will have an advantage over biological women since they will be physically stronger on average

- trans men will have a disadvantage compared to biological men since they will be physically weaker on average

So basically, spaces traditionally carved for biological women could now be usurped by physically stronger self-IDing men in the pursuit of fame, profit, etc.

I'm fine with trans women participating in sports, for example, but I don't think it's fair for self-IDing trans women to compete directly with biological women.

If only there were a way to falsify self-ID claims with physical evidence, this would be a much easier problem.

I think your physical strength argument, which bears the mark of having come from the sports debate, applies only to the sports debate and not to anywhere else. Where else is physical strength used competitively (it must be competitive, or else one person's success would not hurt anyone else) to obtain fame and profit?

Also, league divisions are not done on the basis of physical strength. Should men who are classified as having innately low physical strength (through some kind of genetic or hormone test) be allowed to join the Women's leagues?

If this design were taken to its logical conclusion, we would be calculating an innate ability for every athlete based on our best understanding of genetics and biology to subtract from their score or add to their time. Then, the best athlete in the world would be some fat guy from Odessa, who can't run a 10-minute mile but is related to people who can't run a 20-minute mile. I'm not entirely willing to discard this suggestion - obviously he deserves more respect than someone who was born faster than he is but never trains - but it would change everything about the way sports work.

I guess my point is that if we make it a law that trans men and trans women must be treated indistinguishably from biological men/women under all circumstances, that even more bias in favor of biological males is going to creep into society anywhere physical strength or endurance matters (sports, military, manual labor, search and rescue, firefighting, etc.).

I think it's totally acceptable that your success in those areas (with the possible exception of sports, i.e. due to weight classes) should be determined by your performance and not at all by your category. After all, it sounds absurd to even point out that there are no welterweight wars.

Possibly. A few other hypotheticals:

Do you think a biological male would be tempted to self-ID as a trans woman if he thought it would give him an advantage getting into a prestigious university like MIT?

Do you think a biological male would be tempted to self-ID as a trans woman if he thought it would give him an advantage getting into a prestigious diversity-conscious STEM company like Google?

Basically, I'm just concerned that if self-IDing has no downsides and only advantages, it will be gamed to the detriment of biological females.

Diversity-conscious admissions/hiring is essentially about trying to compensate for past disadvantages. Gender and race are used as proxies, but they're obviously lacking in many ways (the woman's parents could have both been engineers, she could have been surrounded by pro-STEM culture, the native pacific islander could be a millionaire, he could have been to the most expensive private schools in existence) - so I think the right thing to do would be to detach disadvantage estimation from narrow self-reporting and base it on credible signs of disadvantage, like growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of crime.

That's probably never going to happen, though - anything that cut across the real lines of advantage and disadvantage would mean the Google executives establishing the policy would be hurting their own kids the most.

> Do you think a biological male would be tempted to self-ID as a trans woman

Tempted to? Yeah, sure. Actually go through with it—identify themselves to others as a woman, live as a woman, and so on? Probably not. I don't think many could pull it off. And if you messed up, boom, fraud—out the door you go.

Couldn't you just self-ID to one gender, have your cake, self-ID back to your original gender and eat it too? It's not like there's a centralized record enforcing your gender. It's all the honor system. In this day and age you just declare your new gender/preferred pronouns/preferred name on Twitter and that's that. No prescription from a doctor, no legal name change, nothing. Just a tweet and you are done. Nothing is falsifiable.

> Couldn't you just self-ID to one gender, have your cake, self-ID back to your original gender and eat it too? It's not like there's a centralized record enforcing your gender. It's all the honor system.

No, I don't think you could. There's a certain assumption of good faith on the parts of the people you interact with—but once you demonstrate that you aren't acting in good faith, I'm not sure why anybody would believe you, or keep you around.

> No prescription from a doctor, no legal name change, nothing. Just a tweet and you are done. Nothing is falsifiable.

That's kind of like any sort of fraud—when you're applying for a school or a position, you can make up all sorts of things about yourself. If that's the route you want to go, I'm sure there are easier things to lie about. Just—don't claim that you invented post-it notes.

>It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a trans person deserves the simple dignity of being recognized for what they really are (human people), rather than what is convenient for old-fashioned people to see them as

Maybe part of the issue is the way that activists have dishonestly sidestepped any debate over sex/gender by pretending that its "settled science" (it's not) and implying violence to anyone who questions their inane demands.

Being recognized as a "human person" does not entitle you to arbitrarily reengineer norms to your taste. The psychotic desires of a tiny, mentally ill minority (the DSM reclassification was pure politics, transgenderism/body dysmorphia are obviously mental illnesses) should not supercede the rights of the overwhelming majority to feel safe. And whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, a stranger's flopping dick makes the average woman uncomfortable in spaces that have been reserved for them (bathrooms, locker rooms, etc).

We should be offering these people CBT or some other conventional treatment for them to accept themselves as they are, not encouraging them to mutilate themselves with hormones and SRS and forcing society to indulge in their delusions.

The question of "what are you afraid of" stands even in your interpretation. It's tough to say this out loud, but almost every illness is uncomfortable to look at. (Note: the endless debate about whether the "trans illness" is that the body is wrong or that the brain is wrong about the body is not relevant to my point, it suffices only to recognize that something is wrong.)

Lost limbs, burns, skin conditions, non-contagious hacking coughs, every neurological motor disease (which cause strange movements), many sensory conditions (which result in lack of awareness and awkward moments), cognitive conditions which usually result in strange behavior, in one way or another... I have a hard time imagining an illness that would increase people's desire to be around you. The unpleasant reality is that the herd wants to eliminate its weaker members, and we can either embrace that and end up like the Nazis (who exterminated people with physical imperfections and encouraged people who fit their narrowly construed "normal" to breed), or we can resist that part of our nature and be reasonable and kind. Not every part of human nature is good; all evil is done by humans, and everything that humans do is in one way or another a facet of human nature.

There's no clear distinction between the innate desire to get rid of trans people and the innate desire to get rid of anyone who isn't physically or mentally what we're used to, or even the desire to hang around beautiful and intelligent people and leave the ugly ones out. Consequently, it deserves a lot of self-reflective skepticism - because we already know that many of the other behaviors it leads to are harmful even to those who practice them, and beyond that to those who suffer from their practice.

Nobody here wants to “get rid of trans people”, and I think that turn of phrase pretty clearly demonstrates what I’m concerned about. A lot of people have become convinced that, if you don’t agree with their relatively new (and evolving!) ideas about sex and gender, the disagreement by itself constitutes violence against trans people. That mindset seems fundamentally incompatible with academic freedom on gender issues.

I see what you're saying, but "getting rid of trans people," is not an academic issue. It's an issue of whether you invite them to parties, or try to push them out because they make you uncomfortable. We should not let the meta-meta-debate (the debate about whether or not we should be allowed to debate the metaphysical structures of the issue at hand) distract us from the decision we really need to make, which is how to act towards others when they are standing right in front of us.

I really don't know what you mean by "distract" here, because this isn't an issue of some hypothetical in the future. The source article describes a professor who's been analyzing a concrete decision we need to make (what the process should be for legally changing your gender), and protesters who strongly believe that she should not discuss this decision if she doesn't agree with their perspective on it.

Here's what I mean by distract: all of the protesting, all of the comments about the protesting, the entire edifice of cultural activism and reactionary counter-activism, is operating on a level that's totally disconnected from helping anyone.

> But why is that trans people's problem? A predator is a predator and should be dealt with as such.

One inconsistency I've noticed with people making this kind of argument is that they don't extend it to cisgender men. If we don't intend to protect against predators on a demographic basis then why have sex-or-gender-segregation at all?

Not all moral panics are the same. Some are based in reality, some are not. Pretending that just because this is also a moral panic in some sense, there is no truth value to it, is just as thick headed as you accuse others of being.