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This is what I have been wondering about. How would birth sex rules improve safety without ID checking becoming an issue?

A: Toileting is a biological function we all must perform regularly. Locker rooms are used for planned activities that are not biologically necessary and often involve changing clothes or communal nudity. Sports are organized competitions with their own safety and fairness considerations. Prisons involve involuntary confinement by the state and require individualized security assessments. Those factual differences justify different legal rules. Different statutes apply, different governmental interests are involved, and courts decide the particular dispute before them. I am proposing that gender identity matter when deciding which public restroom someone should use. I am not asserting that gender identity replaces biological sex for every legal purpose. No legal principle requires a restroom rule to travel automatically to sports, prisons, or locker rooms. Thank you for your response. Those are differences in setting. They are not a legal wall. It is the practical legalities that I am asking you to address. The rule you are defending is not “people need to pee.” It is that gender identity determines which sex-marked facility the person may use. Public-accommodations statutes, school facility rules, and Title IX guidance have never confined that substitution to a toilet stall. You don't even have to take my word for it on this point, as there is ample evidence from your side of the argument that substantiate it. The 2016 Dear Colleague letter - the purpose and results of which I assume you endorsed - treated restrooms and locker rooms as the same Title IX sentence. GLAAD and the ACLU, both of which advance "advocacy" positions, as you do, state the claim as facilities and activities. Stonewall treated everyday toilets and changing rooms as the default inclusion zone. That is not assertion. It is how the same advocates and the same agencies wrote the rule. These issues are bundled together. Policy decisions made for one will affect the others. Your denial of that is both wishful thinking and not responsive to my question. “Different statutes” only helps you if the statutes use different words. They do not. When “sex” is read to mean "identity" in a restrooms case, the next complaint under the same statute—locker room, team, housing unit—arrives with that reading already in the file. Courts decide the case in front of them. They also cite the last case. That is how the category travels. You do not get a restroom-only holding unless someone writes a restroom-only statute. Necessity cuts both ways. Women also have to use toilets. The question is not whether elimination is optional. It is whether men may be present in women's restrooms while they (women) do it, and whether saying so becomes the civil-rights problem. Locker rooms add nudity; they do not become a different legal universe. They are the same sex line applied where clothes come off. Sports and prison add fairness and security, respectively, as further considerations. They still depend on whether the institution may maintain a female category at all. If identity is enough at the bathroom door, the burden shifts onto the women who want the door to mean something in the next room. You say you are “not asserting that gender identity replaces biological sex for every legal purpose.” That is a personal reservation and preference. It is not in the proposal. The proposal has no limiting principle for who may be turned away, on what showing, by whom. Until you write one that a school, a gym, and a warden can administer without being sued for the same “misgendering” theory, locker rooms, sport, and prisons are not separate issues. They are the next complaint under the rule you have already adopted. You are not addressing the legal realities that come with your proposal. I have previously surmised that this was an intentional motte-and-bailey tactic. Again, you are a smart guy. I had assumed you had given your proposal some real thought and consideration, either before posting it or since. And yet your response to "How, other than by assertion, are women's locker rooms, sports, and prisons 'separate issues' that a self-ID bathroom rule will not reach?" is . . . to repaint your "separate issues" assertion: "different legal rules," "{d}ifferent statutes apply," "different governmental interests are involved." As much as I disagree with the positions taken by GLAAD and the ACLU and the other advocacy groups, I do appreciate their ability and willingness to address what you will not, namely, that public policy and legal analyses about men in women's bathrooms are inextricably linked to policy/analysis about men in women's locker rooms, sports and prisons. GLAAD gets it. So does the ACLU. They get it and, to their credit, acknowledge it and treat these issues for what they legally are: an intertwined, package deals. So what is going on here? As you are staking out a position markedly different from GLAAD and the ACLUE, are you saying they are wrong to treat these matters in this way, and that you are right? If so, what is your legal reasoning? We need to get past sheer assertions ("factual differences justify different legal rules," "{d}ifferent statutes apply," "different governmental interests are involved"). They are not argument or reasoning. They're just an expression of how you think things ought to be. What "factual differences" do you think exist that "justify different legal rules" between women's bathrooms and other sex-segregated spaces? What governmental interests do you think apply to women's bathrooms (which justify putting men in them) but not to women's locker rooms? What governmental interests do you think apply to women's bathrooms but not to women's sports? What governmental interests do you think apply to women's bathrooms but not to women's prisons? Why is your "these are separate issues" claim more legally tenable than the "package deal" position advanced by GLAAD and the ACLU? A: My proposal concerns ordinary public restrooms, not every facility designated for women. People should ordinarily use the restroom most appropriate to their identity, presentation, and circumstances, with the individual making that decision. Someone may be removed for voyeurism, harassment, lewd conduct, threats, or other behavior that would justify removing anyone else. Facility staff, security, or law enforcement may intervene based on credible evidence of such conduct. Mere suspicion about someone’s biological sex would not be enough. Yes, that line leaves room for judgment. That is intentional because people and circumstances vary. Calm and other women have explained that they do not want masculine-presenting transgender men required to use the women’s restroom. I am listening to them. Our disagreement is that you want the state to impose a universal biological-sex rule, while I think ordinary discretion and conduct-based laws usually produce better results. Our current disagreement is that I have asked you to either A) articulate coherent limiting principles for your proposal, or B) concede that your proposal has no such limiting principles. You've been dodging and evading this inquiry for weeks, and you have done so again here. What you are describing is a rule about misconduct after entry. It is not a limiting principle on who may enter, nor is it an acknowledgment that your proposal does not have any limiting principles. “Identity, presentation, and circumstances,” with the individual deciding, means there is no eligibility line. A male who says he belongs there belongs there. That's it. No limiting principle in view. Staff may not act on “mere suspicion” of sex. So the only people who can be refused are people already committing a separate offense—voyeurism, threats, lewdness—that would get a woman thrown out too, and even then they are thrown out after having legally entered already. That is ordinary criminal and trespass law. It does not preserve a women’s room. It is not a limiting principle as to who can enter into women's bathrooms in the first place, which is what I have been asking you to articulate for weeks now. It merely preserves a de facto unisex room with a women’s sign and a conduct code. I understand this. GLAAD and the ACLU understand this. Now I am to conclude that you, being the very smart person that you are, do not understand this, so much so that you are incapable of answering the question I have posed over and over (to identify limiting principles or to acknowledge there are none)? “Ordinary public restrooms, not every facility” is a personal limit you have not written into any statute, handbook, or training. The moment the same person walks from the toilet to the locker room, or a school applies the same nondiscrimination clause, you are back in Questions 1 and 2. Judgment without a standard is the problem, not the solution. After-the-fact “credible evidence of misconduct” is easy to say and hard to use when the policy also says A) anyone who wants to can go into women's bathrooms (because, again, there are no limiting principles), and B) women and girls are not allowed to scrutinize sex or appearance. A woman who reports a male in the room has offered suspicion of sex. On your rule that is not enough. Staff who ask are the ones who get the complaint. That is how the space is policed in the only direction the policy allows: against the woman who noticed. The bearded female is a misdirect. A sex rule sends females to the women’s room, including a masculine-presenting female. It does not “force transgender men into the women’s room” as a punishment; it treats them as female. If you want masculine-presenting females in the men’s room, you have switched legal horses midstream: from identity to looks, while also saying that "looks" should not be investigated. You cannot refuse a sex line and an appearance line and still claim there is a line. "Discretion plus conduct" laws are what we already had for people who use the correct room and then behave badly. The dispute is whether a male may be in the room before any crime occurs. Your answer is yes, unless and until he enters into a women's bathroom (as anyone can, since there are no limiting principles) and then does something independently illegal. This is an admission that there is no limiting principle on entry. It is only a principle on expulsion after the fact. I must think that you recognize this. It's pretty darn obvious. I can't reconcile that surmise of your intelligence with your refusal to acknowledge this obvious thing, except to conclude it is a motte-and-bailey tactic, which you have denied. So what are you doing? A: Sincere self-identification is a limiting principle. It excludes biological males who do not sincerely identify as women, including men who invoke gender identity merely as a pretext. I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females. But that does not mean women’s restrooms cease to exist. They remain designated for women, and ordinary men remain excluded. You are treating any exception to biological-sex exclusivity as the eradication of the category itself. That conclusion does not follow. In practice, nearly everyone would make the same restroom choice under either rule. Most transgender people also try to avoid confrontation and use the facility where they attract the least attention. Your argument treats the possible harm from allowing transgender women to use public toilets as decisive while disregarding the harm caused by legally requiring masculine-presenting transgender men to enter women’s restrooms where they generally are neither expected nor wanted. Both consequences belong in the comparison. "Sincerity" is not a limiting principle. It is an unverifiable mental state. Staff may not act on “mere suspicion” of sex. They have no test for sincerity, no document you will let them demand, and no permission to notice a male body. A pretext from a pervert and a sincere claim from anyone else look the same at the door. A principle that cannot be applied is not a principle. It is a hope that people will be honest. It is wishful thinking. Not workable and legally enforceable public policy. I do appreciate that you have now conceded the legal point, but you then contradict yourself: I am really struggling to understand what your position is. If anyone who wants to can go in, and if there is no limiting principle keeping anyone out, then how in the world do "ordinary men remain excluded?" Who gets to say who is excluded (as in "excluded" from ever going into the women's bathroom in the first place, not after someone has done something wrong after having already entered the space)? By what rule or statute? How are "ordinary men" (I take that to mean "non-trans-identifying" men or some such) to be legally excluded from the bathroom while other men ("trans women") are legally allowed to enter? A women’s room that is “not exclusively limited to biological females” is not a sex-separated space. It is a mixed-sex space with a women’s sign, into which anyone can enter. “Designated for women” does no work once “woman” includes any male who says so. Ordinary men are excluded only if they decline to say the sentence. That is not exclusion by sex. It is exclusion by refusal to self-ID. De jure the category is no longer sex. De facto it lasts only as long as males choose not to use it. “Nearly everyone would make the same choice” is not a rule. It is a prediction, and it is already false in locker rooms, prisons, and sport—the places you keep characterizing as "separate issues." People who want the access use the access. People who do not want confrontation are not the ones who test the policy. The bearded female does not rescue the proposal. Under a sex rule she is female and belongs in the women’s room. If other women are uncomfortable, that is a courtesy problem inside a female category. It is not comparable to admitting males as a class (particularly given that your proposal allows anyone to enter) . One is an edge case about presentation. The other is a change in who the room is for. Treating those as equal “harms” in the comparison is how the category is talked out of existence while the sign stays up, all the while subordinating or disregarding the interests of women and girls who want sex-segregated spaces to remain as such. If the room is still “for women,” say who a staff member may turn away when the only fact is a male body and a female identification. If the answer is no one, until a separate crime occurs, the space is not sex-separated. It is unisex with extra steps. A: The premise of the question is disputed. You have identified possible effects, but you have not established that all of them follow from my restroom proposal. Employers should not discipline women merely for expressing a good-faith privacy concern or requesting an accommodation. They may discipline employees for harassment or for refusing to follow lawful workplace policies. Whether a particular disciplinary action is justified depends on what the employee did, not simply on the existence of a gender-identity access rule. My proposal does change the access line for public restrooms: biological sex would not be the sole criterion. It does not make biological sex unusable or abolish it as a category. Sex can remain relevant in medicine, sports, prisons, and other settings where different interests are involved. I do not support automatically applying the same rule to sports or prisons. Sports raise questions of competitive fairness and physical safety. Prisons require individualized decisions about safety, vulnerability, security, and confinement. Federal prison regulations already use case-by-case assessments rather than gender identity alone. Any actual adverse consequences count. So do the harms caused by your rule, including compelled mismatches, public scrutiny, mistaken challenges, and bathroom avoidance. The question is not whether consequences count. The question is which policy produces less total harm. You have described the mechanism and then denied that it fires. If the workplace policy is identity-based access, a woman who, differentiating by sex, asks a male to leave the women’s room is not “expressing a concern.” She is refusing/defying the policy. That is the charge HR will write. “Harassment” is the label the policy already uses for noticing sex. You say employers should not punish good-faith privacy objections. You have also said suspicion of sex is not enough to intervene. Those two sentences cannot be administered together. The employee who speaks is the one who created a record. That is why the corporation silences her, and all other women, first. It is not a separate hypothetical. It is how a protected-class policy works when "identity" is treated as "sex." “I do not support automatically applying the same rule to sport or prison” is your preference, and your wishful thinking. It is not a legal distinction. The same statute, the same agencies, and the same advocates already use one sentence: facilities and activities consistent with identity. Federal prison placement is “case by case” on paper. The cases that get litigated are demands to be housed by identity. A restroom-only reservation that lives only in this discussion we are having on this message board will not be the brief filed next year. Sex remains “relevant” in medicine only if someone is still allowed to say what it is. Once the institution has trained staff that sex is not a permissible basis for a facility decision, the usable sex line is the one nobody will enforce. That is collapse de facto. De jure it is a mixed-sex room with a women’s sign. You already conceded exclusivity is gone. All consequences count. They do not weigh the same. Compelled presence of a masculine-presenting female in a female room is an awkward edge of a female category. Compelled presence of males as a class, plus discipline of women who object, is a qualitative change in the category. “Less total harm” is not a finding that one Massachusetts police-log paper can supply. It is a request that women and girls absorb the new risk (anyone can go into what are supposed to be sex-segregated spaces) and the new speech rule (women and girls are prohibited from saying anything about men in women's spaces) so that identity can govern the door. If those institutional effects occur and you still want the policy, I think you should actually say they are worth it. Do not say they will not occur because you would rather they were filed under a different heading. A: Reported crime is not the only interest that matters, and I have never said it was. It matters because safety is repeatedly offered as a justification for a new coercive law. If the law is supposed to prevent a safety problem, asking for evidence that the problem exists is entirely appropriate. I also care about privacy, dignity, and comfort, including those of biological women and girls. That is why I oppose a law that requires masculine-presenting transgender men to use women’s restrooms and encourages people to scrutinize women who do not look sufficiently feminine. Privacy includes being left alone while using a toilet. I discard none of these interests. I disagree with your assumption that they can be protected only by categorically excluding every biological male. My proposal asks which rule protects privacy, dignity, and safety better in actual public restrooms, after counting the harms caused by both policies. If you discard none of those interests, you still have to say how a woman vindicates them when a male is already in the room and “suspicion of sex” is not grounds to act. Privacy here is not only “being left alone.” It is being free of the opposite sex while undressed or using a toilet. That is why the room was marked "Women" in the first place: to exclude men from the space. A rule that forbids noticing sex, and that treats a request to leave as the problematic incident, does not leave her alone. It leaves her with a choice: absorb the intrusion and remain silent about it, or else become the problem and face the consequences. Dignity is the same interest. It is not comfort as a preference. It is the institutional statement that this space is not for men. Safety evidence is a fair demand if the only claim is “self-ID will produce a crime wave.” Again, that is not the only claim. The Massachusetts paper counted police-logged incidents in a few towns. It did not count women who stopped using the facility, girls who wait or skip, or employees who were told not to say anything. Those are privacy and dignity costs. They do not appear in a felony file. The masculine-presenting female is still the wrong comparison. A sex rule does not police femininity. It police’s sex. A female who looks male is not “required to use the women’s room” as a humiliation. She is female. If you want her in the men’s room to spare other women a glance, you have switched to an appearance test—the scrutiny you say you oppose. Self-ID plus “don’t look” does not protect the woman who does not pass. It protects the male who claims the label. Also, I am disappointed you persist in ignoring the elephant in the room. I think we all know the vast majority of issues that will arise from your proposal will not be about women who "identify" as men going into women's bathrooms, but rather about all males having lawful access to women's bathrooms. The "masculine-presenting female" may generate some sympathy, but it also evades the central concern affecting women and girls. You say the question is which rule protects privacy, dignity, and safety better after counting both sides. Counting requires a rule that can still say no at the door. Yours says no only after a separate offense. Until then the women’s interest is subordinated to the entrant’s declaration. That is not weighing the interests. It is ranking them and prioritizing the interests of men at the expense of the interests of women and girls who want sex-segregated spaces. I think you need to acknowledge ranking if that is the proposal. Do not describe it as protecting the same things the sex line was built to protect. It doesn't. A: It doesn’t answer Questions 1–5 by itself, and I have never claimed that it does. It addresses one important empirical issue: whether gender-identity access laws are associated with increased reported assaults, sex crimes, or voyeurism in restrooms and similar facilities. The study found that such incidents were rare and did not significantly increase after the laws were adopted. That does not prove that no incident ever occurred, measure every form of discomfort, decide sports or prison policy, or supply a complete legal rule. It does, however, bear directly on your repeated predictions that gender-identity access creates serious safety and privacy harms. Those predictions are factual claims, and the available evidence does not support them. The study is one part of the analysis, not an answer to every question. Then do not keep citing it as if it did. You used Massachusetts to wave off a legal analysis as a “list of hypotheticals” against “what actually happened.” The paper measured police-logged assaults, sex crimes, and voyeurism in a few Boston-area towns. That is one empirical slice of one interest. It does not tell you whether identity-as-sex travels to locker rooms, sport, or custody. It does not tell you who staff may refuse at the door. It does not tell you whether a women’s room remains sex-separated when admission is a declaration. It does not tell you what HR does with the woman who objects. Those were Questions 1–5. You now agree the study does not answer them. Good. Then it cannot be the rebuttal to them. The study also does not do what you still claim for “privacy harms.” An incident that never becomes a police report is not a finding that nothing happened, but that is nevertheless how you are treating it. Avoidance, undressing in a stall, a girl who waits for an empty room, a worker who is told not to speak—those are privacy costs. They are outside the dataset. Again, the 2026 Theory and Society critique of that paper argues it cannot even support the stronger press-release claim about safety, only that logged incidents did not clearly jump in a handful of treated jurisdictions. That is a thin plank for a statewide or nationwide rule. Predictions of a crime wave and analysis of a legal rule are not the same thing. The rule changes who may be present and who may be punished for noticing. That follows from the text of the policy whether next year’s voyeurism count moves or not. If your remaining point is only “we have not seen a statistically significant spike in those particular charges in those particular towns,” say that. Do not treat it as evidence that the institutional effects are imaginary, or that Questions 1–5 have been met. A: I am willing to set aside accusations about you personally and address the substance of your arguments. I will not promise never to describe an argument, policy, or pattern of conduct as bigoted if I believe that description is relevant and can explain why. But I agree that the label should not substitute for evidence or reasoning, and I will not use it that way. Sounds good, I hope. If I argue that your proposal results in a de facto and/or de jure eradication of sex-segregated spaces (which you now kinda sorta admit: "I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females"), that is not bigotry (which is what you said previously: "If ... somebody remains convinced that sex-distinct bathrooms are suddenly in mortal jeopardy without bathroom laws, I can’t help but wonder whether the real problem is them and involves something that rhymes with spigotry"). It's a recognition of how the law and logic and reality work. If I say "'trans women' are not women," that is not bigotry. It is a statement of reality (on part with "dogs are not cats" and "apples are not oranges), and a statement predicated on a refusal to go along with an ideological and radical redefinition of "woman." If I say that gender dysphoria is a mental illness, that is not bigotry. It's a statement of the contents of DSM-V. If I dispute that man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one, that is not bigotry. It's a statement of biological and empirical reality. If I say that a sex-based rule is superior to wholly subjective ones ("self-identity," "appearance," etc.), that is not bigotry. That is a reasoned conclusion based on an axiomatic thing, namely, that sex-segregated spaces should be segregated by sex. If I dispute the claim that a man who sincerely believes he is a woman trapped in a man's body, that is not bigotry (As SU put it: "Your denial of their lived experience is your bigotry."). It's a rejection of an utterly subjective and empirically untestable assertion. And so on. Thanks, -Smac

You are also in my prayers Pyreaux.

The nurse just came, as he was breathing an hour ago, body still warm. He just passed. I'm still grateful for all that your prayers have done in the past. I won't be told, "Ye have not because you ask not." Its as articulate as I can be right now.

Many thanks for the kind words Manol.

I think you are being inspired. And it sounds to me like at-the-time seemingly disconnected threads in your life are now weaving together. I think there's a story out there that wants to be told by YOU.

Over the last few months, many people on the dialogue have responded brilliantly to my posts for advice on health and things to do regarding my (early) retirement. As a result, I have come up with a idea going forward. I have an idea, for possibly, writing a book, factual/partly modern historical, regarding an area of France that I have visited on many occasions. This is something that I have never attempted beforehand. I have plenty of material at hand regarding my subject matter. Also, I have contact details, of various people and institutions regarding further research. I wondered if any others on board the Dialogue, had any thoughts regarding this matter. Any advice, for or against would be most welcome.

I don’t believe it is selfish to want to say goodbye or want to be able to take one’s time and make more memories to hold on to…and if he is still able to give you meaningful answers, that’s not unselfish either to want to get some resolution or family history or just complete the picture of your dad, filling in the gaps that might be left that you weren’t aware of because it takes you experiencing life to realize you don’t know something or whatever those questions are about. It sounds like you have thought about it carefully and it’s not just an emotional refusal to accept their new reality as can happen when death approaches even when one wants what’s best for our loved ones. I hope and pray that you get your time and answers that you need. I would have loved that for myself.

As I type this, OpenAI is rolling out their latest/greatest model, Astra 6. It is hyped as being especially good at complex, multi-step problem solving. As a demo and FWIF: Prompt I want to design a policy governing access to publicly accessible, multi-user restrooms that minimizes harm to biological women and girls and protects their safety, privacy, dignity, and practical ability to use those facilities. Treat “women and girls” in that objective as biological females, so the analysis does not obtain its answer by silently expanding the defined population. Evaluate effects on transgender people, intersex people, caregivers, parents, businesses, employees, law enforcement, and other restroom users separately, because harms to those stakeholders still matter when evaluating the policy’s overall consequences. Compare at least these alternatives: 1. Access determined by sex assigned or recorded at birth. 2. Access determined by sincere gender identity. 3. Access determined primarily by gender presentation and ordinary social judgment. 4. A conduct-based or hybrid rule. 5. Continued informal discretion under existing laws against harassment, voyeurism, exposure, assault, and disorderly conduct. Consider foreseeable benefits and harms under each policy, including crime, harassment, unwanted exposure, subjective discomfort, mistaken challenges, compelled placement of masculine-presenting transgender men in women’s restrooms, bad-faith claims, enforcement errors, bathroom avoidance, vigilantism, administrative costs, lawsuits, and effects on social norms. Do not assume that the presence of a transgender woman is inherently harmful. Do not assume that objections to her presence are inherently irrational or big prejud. Distinguish discomfort from violations of privacy, and both from physical danger. Account for the frequency and severity of each outcome rather than relying on isolated anecdotes or theoretically possible abuses. Limit the primary analysis to ordinary public restrooms. Do not assume that the same rule must govern locker rooms, communal showers, competitive sports, shelters, or prisons. Discuss separately whether the restroom policy would create legal precedents affecting those settings. Use the best available empirical evidence, identify its limitations, and distinguish demonstrated effects from predictions and value judgments. Explain how bad-faith cases would be handled and who would have enforcement authority. State what evidence would cause you to choose a different policy. Define what you mean by “optimal,” then recommend the policy most likely to produce the best overall results, giving particular attention to its effects on biological women and girls. Steelman the strongest objection to your recommendation before answering it. Astra I recommend a hybrid policy for ordinary public restrooms: retain women’s and men’s facilities, permit access consistent with sincere gender identity, strengthen bodily privacy, and give staff clear authority to address threatening or intrusive conduct. Provide private facilities wherever reasonably feasible. This is a provisional judgment about expected consequences. Existing evidence does not establish that this policy uniquely minimizes harm to biological females. It also does not establish that birth-sex restrictions improve their safety enough to offset those restrictions’ foreseeable harms. “Optimal” means the feasible policy with the lowest expected harm, giving particular priority to biological females’ safety, privacy, dignity, and practical access while explicitly considering everyone else. Frequency, severity, duration, enforcement errors, and costs all matter. Assault, repeated intimidation, intrusive questioning, and momentary discomfort should not receive equal weight. Biological females remain the defined population. That includes transgender men and female nonbinary people, whose outcomes should also be reported separately. Transgender women’s outcomes belong in the other-stakeholder assessment. Overlapping categories should not produce double-counting. If exclusively female occupancy is an overriding requirement, birth-sex eligibility follows more directly. But that stipulates sex exclusivity as the objective rather than demonstrating that it best minimizes harm. The most directly relevant published study compared Massachusetts localities with and without gender-identity-inclusive public-accommodation laws. Using police reports involving assault, sex crimes, and voyeurism in restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms, it found no statistically significant increase associated with those laws. Hasenbush, Flores, and Herman That finding is informative but limited. Police records miss unreported incidents and most discomfort or avoidance. Rare events limit statistical power. The study combined facility types, did not comprehensively measure female-specific outcomes, and examined legal changes that might not substantially change actual usage. Its observational design also limits causal inference. “No detected increase” does not mean zero additional risk. A 2025 Williams Institute review reports another analysis finding no increase in stranger violence following inclusive laws. However, the cited manuscript was unpublished, and its outcome was broader victimization, not specifically violence against females in restrooms. The review also documents transgender respondents’ reports of harassment, denied access, and bathroom avoidance. Those surveys establish relevant experiences but cannot isolate a law’s causal effects. Review A frequently cited school study associated restroom/locker-room restrictions with sexual assault among some transgender youth groups. It was cross-sectional, and assaults were not necessarily in restrooms. It does not prove that restrictions caused restroom assaults. Murchison and colleagues The central evidence gap is reliable comparison of biological females’ total experience under competing policies: victimization, exposure, mistaken challenges, discomfort, avoidance, and practical access. The five alternatives have different strengths and weaknesses. First, birth-sex eligibility preserves a female-only entitlement, reassures users who value sex separation, and permits intervention against an ineligible entrant before misconduct. However, it directs transgender men into women’s facilities unless alternatives exist. Enforcement based on appearance can target masculine females. Documentary verification creates practical burdens, while bodily verification would itself threaten privacy. Light enforcement relies heavily on appearance and honesty; intensive enforcement increases costs and mistakes. Second, sincere-gender-identity eligibility avoids directing transgender men into women’s rooms and accommodates transgender women’s ordinary use. Its weaknesses are unverifiable sincerity, dishonest claims, and some females’ discomfort or loss of confidence in sex exclusivity. It is an access principle, not a complete safety policy. Third, presentation and ordinary social judgment often permit unobtrusive use without formal verification. But as an official rule, this makes eligibility depend on stereotypes, “passing,” and the observer. It burdens masculine females and visibly transgender people while remaining vulnerable to convincing disguises. Fourth, a conduct-based hybrid targets threatening behavior and privacy intrusions while reducing identity investigations. Its weaknesses are concealed harmful intentions, inconsistent staff judgment, implementation costs, and unmet preferences for female-only occupancy. Fifth, continued informal discretion under existing laws offers flexibility and low transition costs. Where it works well, sweeping legislation may be unnecessary. However, unclear standards can produce arbitrary exclusion, neglected complaints, and uncertainty about preventive intervention. These comparisons are mostly operational predictions, not measured effect sizes. Each alternative should receive the same feasible privacy improvements and resources; otherwise, architecture gets confused with eligibility. Physical danger, bodily privacy, and discomfort must remain distinct. Assault and confinement concern danger. Peering, recording, and unwanted exposure concern bodily privacy. Unease can exist without either, but persistent distress causing bathroom avoidance is a consequential access problem. An interest in sex-exclusive space also deserves recognition. It may reflect modesty, religion, trauma, or a preference for female association. It is neither proof of danger nor inherently irrational. My value judgment is that it warrants meaningful accommodation without automatically overriding another person’s ordinary restroom access. Private facilities address much of this concern, though they do not reproduce female-only shared space. The recommended policy would operate as follows. Retain women’s and men’s designations and permit sincere identity-based access without medical treatment, prescribed clothing, or documentary proof. Clearly communicate eligibility, including a usable option for nonbinary people. Require working locks, effective stall screening, discreet menstrual-product disposal, and prompt repairs. Improve enclosure during renovations and provide accessible private facilities where feasible. Preserve capacity so improvements do not worsen women’s queues. Prohibit filming other users, peering into stalls, deliberate intrusive exposure, sexual harassment, threats, blocked exits, and unauthorized entry into occupied stalls. Accommodate legitimate assistance, disability-related needs, and ordinary bodily functions. Staff should act on specific observations or credible reports before injury occurs. Repeated attempts to look through a stall gap or following a particular child can justify intervention without waiting for assault. Appearance or transgender status alone should not. Permit necessary accompaniment by parents and caregivers, plus emergency and maintenance access. A private family facility is preferable when available, but its absence must not make essential assistance impossible. Anyone may report concerns and receive respectful assistance. A sincere complaint is not harassment. Patrons should not interrogate strangers, demand documents, photograph them, or obstruct them. Managers handle ordinary complaints and substantiated violations; security assists when necessary; police handle suspected crimes or immediate danger. Disputed exclusions should receive review. Authority must operate within applicable law. Identity supplies neither proof of safety nor immunity. A person credibly shown to be making a dishonest claim solely to bypass eligibility can be redirected. Massachusetts guidance illustrates that inclusive access can include an improper-purpose limitation. Guidance Nevertheless, a quiet liar displaying no concerning conduct may gain access. That is a real vulnerability. Presentation rules likewise admit convincing disguises, while birth-sex rules reduce this vulnerability only insofar as verification occurs. Stakeholder effects require separate accounting. Females gain better bodily privacy and fewer appearance-based challenges, but some lose confidence or avoid facilities. Girls and trauma survivors may particularly need private options. Transgender people gain usable access. Intersex people avoid public adjudication of anatomy or records. Caregivers gain clear assistance rules. Businesses bear training and renovation costs. Employees gain clearer standards, while police focus on conduct. Effects on other users, including displacement into men’s facilities, also matter. Social norms may change in either direction. Inclusive rules may normalize unobtrusive transgender use or weaken confidence in sex boundaries. Restrictive rules may reinforce boundaries or encourage surveillance of unfamiliar-looking women. These remain predictions. This recommendation does not determine policy for showers, locker rooms, sports, shelters, or prisons. Those involve different exposure, fairness, residential vulnerability, or confinement concerns. Legal spillover is possible but not automatic. A facility policy generally creates no judicial precedent; statutes and rulings can have broader implications. Bostock expressly reserved bathroom and locker-room questions. Narrow statutory scope and context-specific reasoning reduce spillover without preventing future litigation. Opinion The strongest objection is that female-only access supplies a preventive safeguard. Inclusive eligibility weakens that boundary, admits dishonest claims, and asks females to identify threatening conduct after entry. Small studies cannot establish that this trade is safe. That objection is substantial. The answer is that a boundary must be evaluated through actual enforcement. Birth-sex rules admit masculine-presenting transgender men, need assistance exceptions, and can expose females to intrusive scrutiny. The decisive question is how much additional protection they deliver relative to their consequences. Current evidence does not establish that balance in their favor. I would change the recommendation if credible comparative evidence showed that restrictions materially reduced serious harm to females after accounting for enforcement mistakes, avoidance, displacement, and costs. Substantial female avoidance despite privacy improvements, recurring exploitation of identity claims, or demonstrably effective and minimally intrusive verification would also warrant reconsideration. Evaluation should combine confidential surveys and incident records, separating discomfort, privacy violations, threats, assaults, denied access, queues, and costs. Serious incidents warrant immediate investigation and targeted correction; general policy changes should follow evidence about preventable mechanisms and comparative risk.

For the record: A: Toileting is a biological function we all must perform regularly. Locker rooms are used for planned activities that are not biologically necessary and often involve changing clothes or communal nudity. Sports are organized competitions with their own safety and fairness considerations. Prisons involve involuntary confinement by the state and require individualized security assessments. Those factual differences justify different legal rules. Different statutes apply, different governmental interests are involved, and courts decide the particular dispute before them. I am proposing that gender identity matter when deciding which public restroom someone should use. I am not asserting that gender identity replaces biological sex for every legal purpose. No legal principle requires a restroom rule to travel automatically to sports, prisons, or locker rooms. A: My proposal concerns ordinary public restrooms, not every facility designated for women. People should ordinarily use the restroom most appropriate to their identity, presentation, and circumstances, with the individual making that decision. Someone may be removed for voyeurism, harassment, lewd conduct, threats, or other behavior that would justify removing anyone else. Facility staff, security, or law enforcement may intervene based on credible evidence of such conduct. Mere suspicion about someone’s biological sex would not be enough. Yes, that line leaves room for judgment. That is intentional because people and circumstances vary. Calm and other women have explained that they do not want masculine-presenting transgender men required to use the women’s restroom. I am listening to them. Our disagreement is that you want the state to impose a universal biological-sex rule, while I think ordinary discretion and conduct-based laws usually produce better results. A: Sincere self-identification is a limiting principle. It excludes biological males who do not sincerely identify as women, including men who invoke gender identity merely as a pretext. I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females. But that does not mean women’s restrooms cease to exist. They remain designated for women, and ordinary men remain excluded. You are treating any exception to biological-sex exclusivity as the eradication of the category itself. That conclusion does not follow. In practice, nearly everyone would make the same restroom choice under either rule. Most transgender people also try to avoid confrontation and use the facility where they attract the least attention. Your argument treats the possible harm from allowing transgender women to use public toilets as decisive while disregarding the harm caused by legally requiring masculine-presenting transgender men to enter women’s restrooms where they generally are neither expected nor wanted. Both consequences belong in the comparison. A: The premise of the question is disputed. You have identified possible effects, but you have not established that all of them follow from my restroom proposal. Employers should not discipline women merely for expressing a good-faith privacy concern or requesting an accommodation. They may discipline employees for harassment or for refusing to follow lawful workplace policies. Whether a particular disciplinary action is justified depends on what the employee did, not simply on the existence of a gender-identity access rule. My proposal does change the access line for public restrooms: biological sex would not be the sole criterion. It does not make biological sex unusable or abolish it as a category. Sex can remain relevant in medicine, sports, prisons, and other settings where different interests are involved. I do not support automatically applying the same rule to sports or prisons. Sports raise questions of competitive fairness and physical safety. Prisons require individualized decisions about safety, vulnerability, security, and confinement. Federal prison regulations already use case-by-case assessments rather than gender identity alone. Any actual adverse consequences count. So do the harms caused by your rule, including compelled mismatches, public scrutiny, mistaken challenges, and bathroom avoidance. The question is not whether consequences count. The question is which policy produces less total harm. A: Reported crime is not the only interest that matters, and I have never said it was. It matters because safety is repeatedly offered as a justification for a new coercive law. If the law is supposed to prevent a safety problem, asking for evidence that the problem exists is entirely appropriate. I also care about privacy, dignity, and comfort, including those of biological women and girls. That is why I oppose a law that requires masculine-presenting transgender men to use women’s restrooms and encourages people to scrutinize women who do not look sufficiently feminine. Privacy includes being left alone while using a toilet. I discard none of these interests. I disagree with your assumption that they can be protected only by categorically excluding every biological male. My proposal asks which rule protects privacy, dignity, and safety better in actual public restrooms, after counting the harms caused by both policies. A: It doesn’t answer Questions 1–5 by itself, and I have never claimed that it does. It addresses one important empirical issue: whether gender-identity access laws are associated with increased reported assaults, sex crimes, or voyeurism in restrooms and similar facilities. The study found that such incidents were rare and did not significantly increase after the laws were adopted. That does not prove that no incident ever occurred, measure every form of discomfort, decide sports or prison policy, or supply a complete legal rule. It does, however, bear directly on your repeated predictions that gender-identity access creates serious safety and privacy harms. Those predictions are factual claims, and the available evidence does not support them. The study is one part of the analysis, not an answer to every question. A: I am willing to set aside accusations about you personally and address the substance of your arguments. I will not promise never to describe an argument, policy, or pattern of conduct as bigoted if I believe that description is relevant and can explain why. But I agree that the label should not substitute for evidence or reasoning, and I will not use it that way.

I was in work getting ready for a shift change over. Being in the UK, made it after midday when it was happening. Myself and colleagues turned on a small TV as the news was coming through.

Prayers said for Ray

OOOPS! I fixed it.

Because I believe he has more fight, this is so sudden. The siblings are planning pilgrimages. They need time. Not have him go while it's just me here. I have my own affairs to wrap up soon this year before he goes anywhere. I seek a new stable plateau, which is entirely possible with a little luck and good fortune. A little hard to explain, but like the 100 questions I wanted to ask my mom before she passed. God gave me that and a year longer than doctors said. Selfish? Maybe, but I think they'd still have wanted that.

Prayers for Ray, dad of Pyreaux. And prayers for Pyreaux, son of Ray. And when the times comes, consolation for all loved ones of Ray.

Is there a reason why you want it delayed or are you just not ready yet to let go (a valid reason and I am not telling you praying for this is wrong, but as someone who has an excellent chance of facing dementia and having seen my mother and grandmother experience it, my belief for me and my family is sooner is better).

It was a Tuesday morning and I was with a co-worker in a car travelling from Phoenix to a client's office in California (near the Arizona / California border). I don't recall if we first heard the news on the car radio or if someone called us on a cell phone, but it was fortunate that we were travelling by car and not by plane that day. It was hard to work with the client that day because everyone was distracted by the news, and it was eerie to see no air traffic in the sky on the drive back home.

Will do.

My dad Ray has dementia and had an asphyxiation incident (the state or process of being deprived of oxygen), as well as recent bowel troubles. I'm hoping he doesn't pass tonight, or tomorrow or this weekend. I believe in the prayers of many, it has worked all my life. Priesthood blessings, not so much. Prayer circles, many times. So, I have plenty of faith in it. Thanks, in advance.

September 11, 2001, my sister barges in my room to exclaim "A plane just hit the world trade center!", but its nearly the tone where she's known to keep me from sleeping in by falsely exclaiming in a non-serious tone, "Wake up, the house is on fire!". So, all I thought was, "That's a random thing to say". I go down stairs, the news people are still assuming it was some accident, so they were filming it live, so we saw the second plane hit. And that is when the news people 180° and were fairly certain it wasn't an accident. It's about time I started watching news, then realizing CNN was only 2 hours of news on loop... It made it really easy to remember my sister's birthday

I wasn’t even a twinkle in my grandfather’s eye, I am guessing. 😛

Where was I? Well, you might guess it. I was in the Sarasota, FL LDS Family History Center on S. Beneva, doing research on some long-forgotten aspect of LDS history. I was sitting, working on the computers, when the ladies turned on the televisions in the center. You may not remember that on the same morning, President Bush was also in Sarasota, reading to the children at Emma Booker Elementary. My wife was teaching her gifted kids at a different school in town. I remember well how they shut down almost all of northern Sarasota to get the president safely to his plane at the airport. It was a chilling morning; I shared with new LDS friends, putting aside our mutual interest in LDS history and focusing on the history that was unfolding in front of us. The impact on Sarasota was significant. It was one of a thousand mornings I have probably spent in LDS history centers, but it most likely was the most memorable one for me. best, Navidad.

I put up a short post but thought I could share a little more about Utah in particular. Here is a breakdown of water inputs and outputs. While that is a lot of water to donate it a minor hedge. The biggest loss of water is just the lake evaporating and there is not that much that can be done about it. I heard there were ideas to try to shade portions of the lake with solar panels or something similar but it is just not viable. Putting metal things and human construction in general near really briny water destroys the thing pretty quickly. Short of arresting climate change not much can be done. The other big drain is agriculture and the biggest water consumer is alfalfa. We should probably grow a LOT less of that. It needs a lot of water and is primarily used for livestock and not human consumption. Alfalfa growth to human calories consumed it is very inefficient. All the consumer level water conservation of replacing lawns and the like won’t move the needle. The biggest move that can be made is cutting back on the alfalfa growing which would of course mean a bunch of alfalfa millionaires (probably including the Church) would fight tooth and nail against it. Also the statement saying the only thing we can do is hope for more rain is defeatist and silly. As the Great Lake dries up there will be less rain. Hoping for a miracle or a short term rainfall of extra rain isn’t sustainable. I also really don’t know how you write a piece like that without mentioning climate change unless you deliberately are trying not to mention it.

It will be interesting what they do with odos (way). Christ says He is the road, the path. In the New Testament, its most common meaning is a road or path. Now that is a means to a destination, so it is easy to understand it metaphorically, as are both other words. Just for me, their discussion was a bit too literal an interpretation of aletheia. It is like looking for a door on a heart. Christ says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. It obviously necessitates a metaphorical interpretation, as do the terms in John 14:6. Best, Navidad . . . . oh and no, I am not literally Christmas!

The whole Southwest is in trouble. Lake Powell is approaching critical levels and it is likely to come down to either keeping Lake Mead or Lake Powell viable and it will almost certainly be Lake Mead that survives for a while. We need to cut water use in all of the southwestern states but everyone largely accepts the need to do that as long as it has no impact on them specifically. It is political suicide to try to make the harsh cuts needed to arrest the problem so the can keeps getting kicked down the road.