I Met Paul Graham Once

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.

> My general moral guideline has been to judge people by their actions.

That's really great, I mean it. But in the year 2025 when it's being mandated from the highest office in the land that trans people don't exist under the eyes of the law, your friends and family who are trans are depending on your affirmative support more now than ever. It's going to be very easy for you to deny their existence, and what would that action say about you as a person?

And before you say "I have no friends or family who are trans", I would respond "that you know of". At the very least, if you work in the tech sector, you likely have several trans coworkers, as trans are overrepresented in tech.

lol, lmao even

Just because we cannot see the physical manifestation of suffering or understand someone's experience when put through the lens of our own experience does not mean that their suffering does not exist or is irrational or delusional. Many chronic pain sufferers understand this.

One thing I can't understand is the assertion that simply respecting another person, usually by doing nothing other than accommodating some alternative pronoun use is such an incredible burden so as to cause apparent extreme mental anguish among the people being asked for this accommodation.

If I have an acquaintance who is transgender, using their preferred pronouns that match their outward appearance and identity is:

1) Not difficult - what is more difficult and socially strange is referring to a person who is trying to present as a woman a "man" or a person who is trying to present as a man a "woman".

2) Not a self-delusion - or any kind of determination at all, really - about their biological sex. I have encountered non-transgender people in my life who are androgynous. You either make a mistake with their pronouns, or ask. There is no way of knowing what their biological makeup is, and I don't experience any kind of internal consternation over it. You take what they say at face value and move on.

3) Is simply offering a modicum of respect.

So much of all of this is tied up in the fact that a lot of people, for whatever reason, just really want to be mean. It seems their default is to be sneering, judgemental, and offer behavior that is more indicative of the worst instincts of high school students rather than well-adjusted adults.