I Met Paul Graham Once

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?

What if this person was someone like the photo I used in the other thread, and they looked something like this: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRO1Vem... - the next time you saw them, would you start referring to them as "she" and call them a liar?

I don't fundamentally agree that dressing, acting, or wanting to be referred to a certain way equates to lying to someone about what's in their pants. Even if it did, I also just don't fundamentally understand why it matters if someone does lie to you about that, in average everyday situations.

I can understand that there are circumstances where it does matter. I'm not saying it couldn't ever. But I don't understand why the default position is rejection and anger.

> 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.

That seems like a solvable problem to me. Our initial attempts at solving it have been awkward, but we'll get there. I think I'm more concerned about what path society agrees on going forward than the specifics of how we do it, for now.

> Destroying these distinctions and saying, "it's all what a person wants to be" is completely novel in history

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).

Sorry to interrupt your slapfight about me, but you do know transgender people are... people... right?

Like we're not just abstract things for you to argue about on the internet. I have blood. And feelings. And goals. And dreams.

It's so bizarre to see people talk about people like me like this, like you've never actually interacted with one of us.

Like we're some kind of philosophical concept or something.

It's weird.

I don't expect compassion or self-reflection out of a green name on the orange site, but I felt the need to say this for some reason.

Have a nice rest of your argument.

Jim Beam did an an actual ad campaign with Ru Paul's Drag Race at the same time. Travis Tritt (who supported the Bud Light boycott) tried to get people to go after them, too. It went nowhere, as had most attempts to protest LGBT marketing. Even Bud Light had done much more overt pro-LGBT campaigns before. The difference was that Ben Shapiro had Mulvaney in the crosshairs and A-B fumbled the response.

Again, the question isn't whether the ad campaign was good, but what it says about Graham's definition of "woke".

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.