I Met Paul Graham Once

You seem to have ignored that all my examples were of biological men entering women's spaces and activities.

A biological female entering men's spaces and activities is far, far less problematic. I for one would have no problem with that person entering a men's restroom or locker room. But I think it's not unreasonable for others to object.

I think the pertinent question is, should a person who made the affirmative choice to transition their body via surgery, hormones, etc. have their preferences supersede those of others who were not involved in that choice? This question is a corollary of a deeper question, which is: should a person who insists that material, shared reality is incorrect have the right to force others to participate in their delusion? Should a schizophrenic experiencing visual hallucinations have the right to reorder society in order to accommodate their delusion? The answer is obviously "no". So why then do trans-people have the special right, in the minds of some, to reorder our language, customs, and culture to accommodate their delusions?

So, returning to your question, my answer would be, either Buck Angel should use a unisex restroom, or, if none is available, go elsewhere to find one.

Here is a sample of what I think are better questions to ask:

Should this person be imprisoned alongside biological women? [1]

Should these biological males be allowed to compete in women's cycling? [2]

Should this man have been imprisoned with women? [3]

Should this biological male have been given use of the girls' restroom at his high school? [4]

Should this biological male have been given use of womens' restroom? [5]

Should this person be imprisoned alongside biological women? [6]

Should this biological male have been given access to the girls locker room at his high school? [7]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67613441

[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/male-cyclists-take-gold-...

[3] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/man-posing-as-tran...

[4] https://apnews.com/article/loudoun-virginia-lawsuit-transgen...

[5] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/transgender-woman-convicte...

[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-45825838

[7] https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/after-trans-woman-exposed...

Corporate isn't an AOL chatroom. I remember those childhood days, and you're right. But the corporate environment I worked in was nothing like that. From about 2014 or so, identity was front and center.

This post [1] mentions a couple of the most salient anecdotes about my experience, but I've got so many more.

I was told I couldn't hire or refer white people on numerous occasions, certain groups (mostly the "WomEng" group) were given nice lunches and off sites and I had to take their oncall or interviews, I was told to cover for the work of underperforming engineers for well over a year before anything was done about it (a couple of non-special friends were simply let go), we all had to sit and watch other engineers get awards for their race (exactly what it sounds like), we had our walls painted with caricatures of our special identity groups. Every bit of it felt like an HR gimmick.

And that's barely scratching the surface.

It was one of the weirdest things I've experienced. And it carried on for years.

I tried to participate. I was an early proponent of this stuff. But when it started turning into favoritism, inauthentic gestures, and began feeling more like policing than something uplifting, it demoralized me and made me feel shitty.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42687151

I’ll say three things:

1) Someone’s body dysmorphia is not - generally - affirmed or denied by ordinary everyday passing social interactions. In polite society, you simply don’t comment on someone’s body composition. Gender is an entirely different matter as it is a constant differentiator in day to day life. Also, in my experience, body dysmorphia has nothing to do with other people’s affirmations. We’ve all seen examples of people getting repeated surgeries to change their appearance because they simply cannot see what everyone else is seeing when they look in the mirror.

2) I think in determining “how to handle it” from the perspective of psychotherapy, we should consider what treatment is considered effective. 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.

To me, this makes sense when applied to your own life. Therapy might be able to help me realize that my perception of the size of my nose is not accurate, but therapy is not going to be effective at changing my gender identity. Do you feel that your gender identity could be changed using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

3) Refer back to the questions that I think should be asked if you find it too difficult to accommodate pronouns:

>What do you expect someone who is gender dysphoric to do? What do you believe the appropriate course of action is for someone in that situation? What would you expect or appreciate if you were a person in that situation?

The vast majority of people with some kind of intersex disorder are still very clearly either male or female. Hermaphrodites, that is, people whose primary sex organs developed in a way that make them truly ambiguous, are vanishingly rare. And in that case it would be acceptable for them to identify as whatever sex they feel is the closest.

My problem is not that I'm never willing to be generous and charitable with people who are genuinely edge cases. My problem is corporate and government policies that require me to lie about non-edge cases.

* I know a lot of trans people - MTF and FTM - who are not distinguishable from your definition unless you interrogate their genitalia, or in some cases, their genetics. If you see such a person, and use the "wrong" pronouns according to your definition for them, would you then feel guilty for not using the "right" ones? If not, why not?*

Again, my problem is required being to lie. If I have a coworker who I know is a man, he has always called himself a man, he has the secondary sexual characteristics of a man, he is six foot with a beard, he has sired a child -- and then one day he comes into the office wearing a dress and long-hair and insist on being called a "she" and insist on going into the woman's locker room at the gym, I would find that intolerable because I know the coworker is not a woman. I am being told to lie.

If my boss says "There are four marbles in this box" and I have never seen inside the box, I will say, "Ok, got it, I have no reason to accuse you of lying, there are four marbles in the box." But if I see with my own eyes that there are two marbles in the box, and my boss says, "There are four marbles in the box, say it say 'there are four marbles' it or you are fired" that is dystopian and intolerable.

Now, let's say I have a coworker who always presented as female, the coworker maybe had a bit of an uncanny valley thing at times, but I have never asked about it and have always called the coworker "she." One day, there is a work-family outing to a water park, and in the locker room the coworker is naked and exposes zis penis in view of my wife and daughter and they tell me about it. I would not feel guilty about calling the coworker "she" but I would feel angry with the coworker for lying about his sex.

And even if that isn't true, why does "adult human female" have to map to "woman", and vice versa?

The entire point of language is to "cut reality at the joints", we create words in order to group natural kinds together in a way that allow for common understanding and decision-making. If society wants to redefine "woman" as meaning something else, we would still want a word to mean "adult human female" because it is a natural kind. When we redefine woman, we see all the contortions people go . All of science, all of human knowledge relies on being better and better at organizing and recognizing and create common language around finding patterns in nature.

All of this is to say that I don't see how your reduce-it-to-biology-and-never-waver definition is workable in society, and I don't understand why folks - yourself included, it seems - are so insistent on it.

For all the reasons we make distinctions between men and women, or divide up men and women -- from locker rooms to sports to prisons, to assigning rooms during multi-family vacations, or assigning rooms at college, to single-sex schools, to certain dress standards, to sexual harassment litigation, to etiquette and social norms around inviting people to do activities -- it all comes down to biology. It all comes down to massive physical disparities between men and women (eg, a punch from an average man does to a woman does approximately 1000% the damage a punch from a woman does to a man), and the male potentiality to impregnate women, and all the physical and biological differences that have evolved as a result of reality. The reason historically cultures have clothing and appearance cues to distinguish sex is because the biology is very important, we want to know it as soon we meet someone, but we don't want to look at their genitalia, so cultures have arbitrary conventions (pronouns, male & female names, pink versus blue) etc. to indicate biological sex at first meeting. Destroying these distinctions and saying, "it's all what a person wants to be" is completely novel in history and the burden of proof is on those who want to change the status quo, and after following this issue for 15 years I only become more convinced that burden-of-proof has not been met and that it really does all come down to biology.

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.