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So I have been waiting for more LDS input. I thought Ostler was too "classical" for most LDS. Calm, you will remember our friend David Waltz. I just now left a message on his phone. He has a library of LDS books like probably few LDS and no other non-LDS in the world. Ostler is the only recommendation? He is the last word? Surely he is not the only word? Anyway, I will report back if I find out there is any other LDS book that talks about God as an exalted man.

A distraction? Or you can't answer the question. In you binary view on sex, are they male or female? If you can't answer that, then you can't keep claiming that all sex is binary. What has been central to this discussion is whether sex is binary or if there is a spectrum. You can reject the claim all you want. If you can't answer that simple question, then you are just ignoring concrete proof that sex is not always binary. We aren't talking about allowances. The question is very specific. What binary sex is someone who is intersexed. Your whole foundation of your position is that sex is binary. If intersexed individuals are not male or female, but rather both, then it totally disproves that sex is binary. So I am very interested in a real honest straight forward non dodge answer to a very simple question.

I read what ChatGPT had to say. It is, I think, a fairer account of some of your later qualifications than of the rule we have been arguing about. Those are not the same thing. You often describe your view as “do not pass a law assigning every person a toilet by sex,” plus “use the room that minimizes discomfort,” plus “sports and prisons are separate.” ChatGPT took that package as the position and then scored my post as a straw man. The disagreement is not that you have never typed the words “women and girls.” It is that identity access plus no administrable gate / limiting principles is still the operating idea, and that idea does not stay as modest as the qualifications. Some additional thoughts: What I mean by “no limiting principle”: I had thought that by now "limiting principle" would be pretty clear. Perhaps not. “Go where you think is most appropriate” and “don’t harass anyone” are conduct rules. They are not a rule for who belongs in the women’s bathroom. Every existing criminal law against voyeurism already applies under a sex rule too. If the permission slip into the women's bathroom is an individual's self-declared-and-not-to-be-questioned-and-entirely-subjective "identity," or even “presentation”, then the class that may enter is no longer “female.” The class, instead, is anyone any everyone. That is the point I keep asking you to address. What I mean by “bathrooms will not stay in their box”L: I am not saying you personally demand Lia Thomas in the NCAA or males in women’s prisons. I am saying the legal justification and framework you use for bathroom use - "the sexed door tracks identity/expression, and a sex rule does more harm than good” - is the same justification activists and counsel can and certainly will use in those other contexts (changing rooms, sports, prisons). Calling them “separate issues” is a conversational preference. It is not a legal fence. If a school board or a court accepts the bathroom argument, they will be asked why changing rooms are different. “Because Roger said so on page 17” will not be the answer. Whether the discussion continues under your ever-increasing outsourcing to ChatGPT, I hope you will address this. Legal argument often arises from analogy. By way of example: I am currently in a lawsuit about an easement. My client's neighbor is suing her and asking the judge to impose an easement on her property under an "easement by implication" theory. Case law in Utah is very clear that a similar but still distinguishable legal theory, "easement by prescription" requires the claimant to prove the existence of the easement by "clear and convincing evidence." The law is similarly clear that Utah's appellate courts have not yet held that this same - and more difficult - evidentiary standard applies to "easements by implication." In a recent motion I asked the court to made a decision on which evidentiary standard applies, "clear and convincing" or "preponderance." My argument was to compare and analogize the evidentiary standard in Utah for prescriptive easements, and also to cite to other jurisdictions which have adopted a "clear and convincing" standards for implied easements. Essentially, I said this: "The Utah appellate courts have not given specific guidance on this issue, but it has on prescriptive easements, which are not materially distinguishable from implied easements in that in both instances the servient estate gets an easement imposed on it against its will. That's a pretty hefty incursion into property rights, so if 'clear and convincing' applies to prescriptive easements, it should also apply to implied ones. Several other jurisdictions have adopted this approach..." Another example of how analogy and comparison work in the law: Pierson v. Post, a New York state decision from 1805 that has become one of the most famous property law cases in American history. Here are the facts: Here's the majority opinion: Pierson ended up creating or introducing "a coherent principle on how property can be first possessed by a human being." "Determining the rightful ownership of the fox involved the essence of the human notion of 'property' itself and how it is created, and for this reason Pierson v. Post is included in nearly all Anglo-American property casebooks." Pierson is used to establish basic principles of property ownership for all sorts of things, including oil and natural gas (which, like the fox, is ferae naturae, and hence subject to the "Rule of Capture," which is that the person who captures the wild thing is entitled to ownership of it). Here is why I am bringing up this case: If Pierson v. Post, an 1805 case from New York about two hunters chasing a fox, can be used by oil and gas attorneys in Houston in 2026 to make a legal point about an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, then then it is very likely that lawyers suing for men to gain access to women's changing rooms / sports / prisons will argue via analogies to bathroom access. If the law re-defines sex-segregated bathrooms to "any man who claims the women's bathroom suits him better," then why can't that same basis be used to allow men into women's changing rooms? Sports? Prisons? You keep waiving these off as "separate issues." They are not. They are tightly interwoven issues, such that activist progress in one will almost certainly help activism to progress in the others. I have a hard time believing that you are not fully aware of this, both because you are a smart fellow, and because you have ChatGPT at hand, and because I have explained the foreseeable legal reality quite a few times now. My surmise is that ignoring it is part of the motte-and-bailey strategy. What I mean by “eradication”: I do not mean the signs come down next Wednesday. I mean sex stops being the thing by which access to the space is differentiated. Two doors labeled “men” and “women,” with males admitted on identity, are not sex-segregated spaces with a few hard cases. They are mixed-sex rooms that kept the old paint. ChatGPT treats that as merely a small edge-case tweak. That is the baseline motte-and-bailey trick: If the baseline for access into women's bathrooms is “whatever we have now plus self-ID,” then insisting on sex looks “radical,” and dissolving the criterion looks “conservative.” In contrast, my baseline is that using “women” on the door means human females (women and girls). You have said you are using "woman" as a social category. That is a redefinition for purposes of the bathroom, even if you still admit the biology in a footnote. Again, motte-and-bailey stuff at work. On harm to women and girls: Your harm story that ChatGPT liked is mostly: a sex rule would put some passing "trans men" (male-appearing females) in the women’s room and that would scare other females. That is a real awkwardness. It is not the same problem as opening the women's bathroom door to all males, which is the natural and foreseeable result of your policy proposal. Gender-nonconforming women already have a right to that room. The rare passing trans man is a hard case. Hard cases are not a warrant to rewrite the class. On the AI referee: A model asked to summarize your later posts will sound like you. That does not convert the summary into a finding that my concerns are imaginary. I have not ignored your answers. I have said they do not do the work you assign them. I still think the decent shared solution is more single-occupancy rooms and a sex rule for multi-user women’s facilities—not a chatbot’s claim that the sex rule is the radical one. If you have a limiting principle that keeps males as a class out of the women’s room without collapsing into “whoever says so,” I sure would like to see it. However, I think we both know you will not present any such limiting principle, and I think that is because you are ideologically constrained to do so. The second you make any concession which differentiates access by men from access by women, or which differentiates some "trans women" from other "trans women" (which is what CB is proposing), you will run afoul of ideological demands, the advocates of which will brand you a bigot. I have previously pointed this out. From a previous post: I appreciate you sharing your perspective on locker rooms and other places where people are actually undressed. You would restrict those to people who have fully medically transitioned, and you would provide a private alternative. That is a real line. It is also a form of "gatekeeping." That is the piece I want to flag, because it sits uneasily with how this conversation has gone. CB's proposal openly does not treat identity as sufficient. It treats identity plus medical and other steps (physician care, a year of hormones, a doctor’s declaration, a changed ID) as the price of entry. Many advocates will reject that on principle. In that framework, a “trans woman” is a woman because she says so. Requiring hormones, surgery, or paperwork is itself treated as denying her womanhood. You said you don’t particularly care that some people will object. Fair enough. But that objection is not a fringe footnote. It is the mainstream activist claim. You have previously described disagreement with parts of the trans movement as "bigotry." The difficulty is that the rule you are now willing to accept would, by that same standard, put you in the same category. Distinguishing “fully transitioned” males from males who only identify as women is the differentiation I said would draw fire. If drawing that line is bigotry when I do it, it does not become something else when the line is hormones-plus-ID rather than sex. Motte-and-bailey. It's happening all through this thread. Thanks, -Smac

No worries. My post was a meaningless rant itself. I don’t like being treated or talked to like we are 6 and teaching that class yesterday I felt highly annoyed.

Sigh. You are ignoring what I say, fighting against a straw man, and making wild proposals that will harm the people you say you want to protect (i.e. woman and girls--using your definitions). Or so it seems to me. I asked ChatGPT to look at every post in this thread and evaluate this. I’ll put the prompt in a quote box and GPT’s response below in blue. GPT: I read the supplied conversation from forum pages 10 through 23, including the later posts where Analytics and Smac clarify positions that were less precise earlier. I am using “women and girls” exactly as you requested: biological females, regardless of gender identity or expression. Answers 1. Has Analytics addressed the impact of the various bathroom policies on women and girls? How much? Yes, substantially and repeatedly. A recurring part of his argument is that a strict biological-sex rule itself harms females—particularly by requiring very male-presenting biological females to enter women’s facilities, thereby creating fear, confrontation, and privacy problems for other females. My read is broadly consistent with Calm’s later estimate that roughly one-quarter to one-third of Analytics’s posts contained explicit discussion of the impact on females, with the issue implicit in additional posts. 2. Has he argued that Smac’s proposed laws will do more harm than good to women and girls, and that this is one of the main reasons he opposes them? Yes. Analytics repeatedly frames the issue as a harm-benefit comparison, saying Smac’s laws create “real-world problems to solve a hypothetical problem,” questioning whether they do “more good than harm,” and eventually stating expressly that the biological-sex requirement “harms women and girls.” That is clearly one major reason for his opposition, although not the only one; he also emphasizes liberty, harms to transgender people, lack of demonstrated need, and legal/constitutional concerns. 3. Does his preferred bathroom policy require the formulation of a strict “limiting principle”? If not, should he be required to articulate one? No strict categorical limiting principle is logically required by his basic proposal, because his proposal is essentially “don’t enact a law assigning everyone to a restroom by sex.” He nevertheless eventually articulates a softer principle: use the restroom that minimizes discomfort, use it for its ordinary purpose, and obey laws against harassment, voyeurism, intimidation, etc. I would not require him to invent a bright-line sex/anatomy rule merely to defend not having a bathroom-assignment law—although if he were proposing an affirmative legal entitlement overriding property owners or institutional rules, a more administrable legal standard would be necessary. 4. Would expanding Analytics’s reasoning to other settings give men carte blanche to enter women’s changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports? No. That is not a fair description of his position. Analytics explicitly says those are “separate issues”; he supports allowing sports organizations to exclude biological males from female competition, and he says prisons and shelters should make context-specific decisions. His locker-room position is more permissive and less sharply defined, but even there he discusses conduct, nudity, and privacy separately rather than asserting an unrestricted right of entry. 5. Is Analytics arguing that the word “woman” be radically redefined? Not as a biological term. He explicitly says that when he calls a transgender woman a “woman,” he is using woman as a gender/social category, “rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female”; he simultaneously says that this does not require pretending biological sex has changed. Smac can reasonably object that this is a broadened social usageof “woman,” but Analytics is not claiming that biological males thereby become biological females. 6. In my opinion, is “the foreseeable effect of Analytics’s proposal the eradication of sex-segregated spaces”? Has Smac provided valid evidence for that view? No, if “eradication” means that men’s and women’s facilities disappear or cease functioning as distinct spaces.Analytics’s policy would admittedly make them less than perfectly sex-exclusive under your strict biological definition, because some biological males could use women’s rooms and some biological females could use men’s rooms; but that is very different from eradicating the two-space system. Smac has provided valid evidence that offenses and privacy conflicts sometimes occur in female facilities, but he has not provided evidence establishing the much stronger causal claim that Analytics’s policy foreseeably causes sex-segregated facilities to disappear; his strongest case for that proposition is conceptual rather than empirical. 7. Which proposal is more radical? Will Analytics’s proposal lead to the eradication of sex-segregated spaces? As a matter of government policy, I think Smac’s is more radical: it takes what historically operated largely through social convention and individual judgment and turns it into a categorical, legally enforced biological-sex rule. Analytics’s position is more revisionary if the baseline is strict biological exclusivity, but overall it leaves the familiar men’s/women’s restroom system intact and changes how difficult edge cases are handled; I do not think it foreseeably leads to the practical eradication of separate men’s and women’s spaces. Representative quotes Analytics: “What is your basis for thinking that the laws you support are doing more good than harm?” Analytics: “The laws you support are creating real-world problems to solve a hypothetical problem. The tradeoff isn't worth it.” Analytics: “The limiting principle should be this: if you need to go to the bathroom, go in to the one you think is most appropriate…” Analytics: “Do sex-distinct facilities have value? Sure. Nobody is arguing against that.” Analytics: “I'd love to hear a professional psychologist explain why requiring this individual to use women's restroom would be psychologically beneficial to women and girls.” Analytics: “Sex-distinct restrooms in free societies have thrived for generations without laws assigning every person to a restroom according to biological sex.” Analytics, on locker rooms/sports/prisons: “Those are separate issues. If we want to analyze them rationally, we should treat them as separate issues.” Analytics, on sports: “If you are transgender and want to swim, then swim with the boys. Or don’t swim.” Analytics: “I was using [‘woman’] as a gender category rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female.” Analytics: “Your preferred solution—requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex rather than their gender expression—harms women and girls.” Smac: “Bathrooms will not stay in their box… there is no principled line” preventing the reasoning from reaching changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports. Smac: “There are documented incidents of males accessing female facilities and committing offenses.” He then provides a list of examples. The biggest thing I think the full 14-page exchange establishes is that Smac’s characterization of Analytics as simply ignoring women and girls, opposing sex-separated spaces, refusing any limiting principle, and necessarily opening every female setting to every male is not a good description of Analytics’s actual position by the end of the discussion. Smac has serious substantive objections to Analytics’s position, some of which are legitimate policy questions, but several times he turns a disagreement with Analytics’s answer into a claim that Analytics has not answered the question at all.

Hi MustardSeed. I apologize for my rant about new words and names of places. It distracted from the discussion and I am sorry if it seemed directed at you personally.

Also: https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/14/#findComment-1210274436 https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/14/#findComment-1210274474 I am going to stop now, my estimate is a quarter to a third of analytics’ posts that I read through again included explicit comments while some others it’s implied imo.

He has posted a number of pictures of trans men and commented on how well that’s going to go over with women and girls when these trans men are forced to use female only restrooms (or none at all if they are the only ones available). That repeated observation included comments about women’s reactions…which became my primary focus. For example: https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/11/#findComment-1210274247 This one’s purpose is solely to point out women and girls might not want trans men who present as men in their space: https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/12/#findComment-1210274294

I don't think Analytics has commented on this much. I should have been more clear about that. My apologies. Thanks, -Smac

Do you mean Mumbai? If so, then I am smiling as I too have moments where I become aware of novelties to me that have actually existed for 30 years or longer. Mumbai became the official name in 1995 according to wiki. So my guess is it was a bunch of fuddy duddies who changed it to be more consistent with a local version rather than the colonial name.

Except what you said was there wasn’t commentary on the impact of women and girls…but there was. Even if you disagreed it was an accurate assessment, it was still present. So it looks pretty much like “not listening” to me when you claimed discussion on impact on females was missing or “precious little”.

I am unclear which lane you picked. The one I labeled "My lane." First, I will again note that these references to people with DSDs are a distraction, as we all know that what is really being discussed is policy preferences designed to let unambiguously male persons into women's spaces. Second, I respectfully reject the claim that there are more than two sexes. There is a sexual binary: male and female. That is it. There is no third sex and no sexless kind of human. Every person is male, female, or (in vanishingly rare DSDs) a disordered mix of those two developmental pathways. Surface uncertainty is not a third category. Modern testing resolves almost all of those cases to one pathway. The handful that stay mixed are still not a third sex. For people with some forms of DSD, I have acknowledged, several times now, that some case-by-case allowances and accommodations can be made for the exceedingly small number of persons who have a DSD and whose biological sex is insuperably epistemically uncertain. Thanks, -Smac

Are you sure the real problem is you aren’t listening? I think there can be, in some circumstances, the tendency to construe disagreement as "not listening." I appreciate you putting a prompt in writing. I do not accept the result as settling the question, for reasons that have nothing to do with “not listening.” 1. Safety is not the only reason those rooms exist. I've said this a lot, and I think you have overwhelmingly ignored and sidestepped it. (I also surmise that this ignoring/sidestepping is a studied and intentional element of the motte-and-bailey tactics being used.) Sex-segregated bathrooms were also built for privacy and propriety: undressing, menstruation, a locked stall next to a stranger of the other sex. “No statistically significant spike in reported stranger rape after a city ordinance” does not answer that. A woman can be wronged without needing to become a crime statistic. Your prompt told the models to weight assault frequency and to treat discomfort as a lesser, “less quantified” harm. That is a value choice baked into the prompt, not a finding. I have been talking about women and girls the whole time. Reducing their interest to “did a paper find more police reports?” is how the impact on them keeps disappearing. 2. There is still no limiting principle. I have have been addressing, and you have been largely ignoring/sidestepping, the utter lack of any meaningful limiting principles in your policy proposal. Again, I think this is a studied element of the motte-and-bailey strategy. “Use the room that matches identity” has no stable stop. Identity is self-reported. If the rule is the claim, then any male who makes the claim is in. You could, I suppose, add “must pass,” “must have surgery,” “must have a letter." Those are different policies. But you have not proposed or defended any of them, and I think intentionally and deliberately so. I surmise that you do not want there to be any limiting principles, because as soon as you present one there will be vitriol from quarters of the trans advocacy groups calling those limiting principles "bigotry" and whatnot. And without limiting principles, the foreseeable effect of your proposal is the eradication of sex-segregated spaces. That is not a moral panic. It is me anticipating the motte-and-bailey switcheroo, and you sidestepping it. To wit... 3. Bathrooms will not stay in their box. If the legal justification is “identity is what the sexed space tracks, and doubting that is bigotry,” there is no principled line that keeps that same justification for putting men in women's changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports. Those are not “other topics.” They are the same rule applied to rooms where the stakes are higher. I have already said I want a bright line for that reason. Motte-and-bailey will show up there too: motte = “rare DSDs / rare violent incidents”; bailey = males in the women’s category (bathrooms and changing rooms and sports and prisons). 4. The AI exercise is not evidence. You wrote a prompt that tells three consumer models to ignore one group, treat anecdotes as almost weightless, and compare two crude policies. Those models are trained on the same institutional language your prompt is written in. That they returned Policy A is not a natural experiment. It is three autocomplete engines agreeing with the literature they were fed. Grok’s answer even concedes discomfort under A is “plausible but less quantified,” then still picks A. That is a weighting rule, not a measurement of what women are owed. 5. Policy B as you defined it is not quite my view. I am not trying to march passing trans men into the ladies’ room as a gotcha. The rule I have been defending is sex, observed and recorded as the two reproductive classes—not “whoever looks the part,” and not “whoever says the words.” Awkward edge cases exist. They are not a reason to admit the entire male class on a declaration. Gender-nonconforming women already belong in the women’s room. A sex rule does not require them to look feminine enough for a stranger’s taste. An identity rule does invite strangers to police appearance, which is the confrontation scenario your prompt attributes only to Policy B. 6. Other costs your prompt underweighs: Avoidance: girls who will not use the school restroom, women who skip public facilities. That is harm even when no assault is filed. Predation: the question is not “do most trans people assault women?” It is whether a self-ID door is usable by men who are not dysphoric and do not care about your ordinance’s spirit. The obvious and foreseeable answer is "Yes." Single-occupancy is the actual harm-reducer both sides can live with. Expanding those does not require renaming sex. Category collapse: if “woman” for the door means identity, you have not minimized harm to women. You have changed who counts as the group whose harm you were supposed to measure. Men being told they may not enter the women's bathrooms, and vice versa, is not the same kind of injury as women losing a sexed space. One is a boundary. The other is the erasure of the boundary. I can want people with dysphoria treated decently (medical care, safety from assault, single-user options) without conceding that the women’s room is the remedy. Kindness does not require us to pretend a male is a woman so that the prompt can close. I will keep trying to be measured. I will not treat three chatbots and a harm-only-if-felony frame as the last word on why those doors say “women.” Thanks, -Smac

I found out Friday night that the young have changed the name of Bombay, India. I don't need to say the new name. I guess I dislike all the name changes and new vocabularies needed to communicate with the young. But whatever. Enjoy your new schedule and your new words. Sorry that our words (and schedule?) don't work for you.

I know I am giving myself away as old and out of touch. Is it good, or bad, or something else, to be "gobsmacked", according to the current lexicon among our young people?

We might have forgotten to watch the videos today.

I feel like we need another meeting to discuss the new schedule 😅 I teach GD and a guy in our class who attends every week was gobsmacked to learn that he would be attending Sunday school AND priesthood every week. I told him it was his fault that we had to spend the entire class time watching the videos. ☠️🤣 and then we had to go to RS and watch another video and discuss yet again! Apparently I did not get enough because here I am talking about it again. Heaven forbid bigger changes than this.

Best to you too, Navidad. God brings good out of bad, out of weakness. I hope you and Mrs. Navi the best. God knows what that is for each individually. Its a tough life for most. Keep on. We are getting towards the end. Keep on. We still have maybe greater strength than ever we have known, when we are frail in body. God love you and Mrs. Navidad.

I get this idea and I somewhat agree with it and personally think that one can have meaningfull worship on a noisy, crowded bus too, but if the decorations, the music, the sounds, the design don't help people be in the right headspace why does anyone have them at all? It's because it helps those who are willing to try to get in the right space get there. I think what is wanted in chapels by those who complain is a change of focus. It wasn't all that long ago that the church said the hallways and foyers should have pictures that focus on Christ, yet the room where he is worshipped in a meeting house has no pictures/statues of Christ. So are most of those who are complaining they are not ornate enough really meaning they are not fancy enough or do they just mean the chapels themselves don't remind them of Christ?

That is the hardest part of my health issues for me.

I posted within minutes of your non-edited post. I did not see the part about the catacombs. I assumed you were talking about unadorned simple Catholic churches where the mass either could or would not be as meaningfully experienced as in Notre Dame. I reacted, because my little community has two very non-adorned Catholic churches. They also have no heat or air-conditioning. So they are quite uncomfortable for the parishioners. Ditto for the Pentecostal Assembly of God church in our village. But I would not call them dreadful and undesirable settings. I thought you were doing so. Then, I left the room for a few minutes and came back and deleted my post (still not having seen the catacombs part). I just decided that my one post today was one too many, so I deleted my second one. My truth about today is that my wife and I both are having very bad health days today. I regret it when I am not up to taking the very best care of her. I was worried that truth was eeking out into my posts. That in and of itself might be a dreadful and undesirable thing. Best, Navidad

I am unclear which lane you picked. What binary lane do you put someone who is born intersexed?

For sure. The church would do well to make that effort a bit easier.

Personally, I don't care what the reason is. People are keeping their covenants. I think that's awesome.

In terms of the life of the Church, not at all! Less than two millenia. I tried to emphasize that dreadful settings, necessarily endured with our Lord are wonderful. You might have missed my edit? The importance has to do with necessity. When it became unnecessary to celebrate our faith in ancient tombs, it seemed to be inoffensive and even pleasing to God if we should celebrate in a more congenial atmosphere. I am saying that it might be good if none of God's people assume that a particular of worship, imposed by particular circumstances should be thought to be normative for all times and places. I was giving an approval, for what my approval is worth, if the Latter-day Saints are being led towards a worship space that welcomed a more visual experience of God as well as the auditory. I am not forgetting that "faith that cometh by hearing". But I am thinking that all of our senses can come into play in our worship. PS: I see you changed your mind about posting. That's fair. I did not take your remark in an adversarial way. I hope that my reply clarifies my thoughts in a way that you and our LDS friends find to be reasonable.