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That is very well said. I had a friend who became rather well known for saying, "A true friend is one who offers you a different view of the world without making yours wrong." I really like that a lot. If I come across as offering my opinion/belief in order to make yours wrong, then I have failed my friend's test. That wasn't my intent. If your comment was in connection with my latest post, then I receive and accept the kind rebuke. I just hope that doesn't mean that I can no longer offer the same in the future. Please be assured that I will and have offered the same to any church or organization of every kind, just as I have done to organizations all my life. It is how I earned my living. Having said that, I don't want to be in denial because I have blind spots. @bluebell thanks for your comment whether it was offered to me, or not. You have made me think as you so often do. I appreciate that.

Those who are convinced that we are not doing things the “right“ way will often tell us we need to change and behave more like they behave and believe more like they believe. We do the same. We are just honest enough to acknowledge it.

I don't have any comment, really, about retrofitting chapels, or what might be needed to do so. Personally, if I'm not in the right headspace, my exterior surroundings cannot do anything for me to put me in a more worshipful mood. I rather suspect that some of the most meaningful worship has been done in foxholes, or in grass huts, or in other, similar "facilities." Could our worship spaces be improved? Perhaps. But it does seem as though Latter-day Saints can't win. On one hand, our chapels aren't ornate enough. On the other hand, why does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints blow such massive "fat $tax of ca$h" [my term, obviously] on Temples rather than feeding the poor? (I say that when it comes to building Temples and ministering to the temporal needs of the poor, the Church of Jesus Christ can "walk and chew gum at the same time," but ... that's another subject for another day.) This does seem like a very first-world problem to me. For example, as humble as the Church "building" in the link below is, is it an improvement (and, in many cases, a vast improvement) over where these Saints worshipped previously? I would say yes. I think a healthy sense of perspective is in order. [Note: I know someone posted previously on the "Meetinghouse Plus" project here, and I know I commented on that thread, but my efforts to find it have been unavailing. Please pardon the duplication.] https://www.thechurchnews.com/members/2026/07/20/simple-meetinghouse-plus-project-remote-pacific-islands-light/

Are you sure the real problem is you aren’t listening? Let me address this another way. I worked really hard to create an unbiased prompt that asks AI to address this issue. The prompt says to ignore the wellbeing of transgender individuals and focus only on the wellbeing of cisgender women and girls. I then fed the prompt to Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT. All three models gave the same answer: if the objective is to minimize the expected harm to (cisgender) women and girls, then people should be free to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity. Prompt: Grok's full answer: I agree with ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok on this: your preferred solution--requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex rather than their gender expression--harms women and girls. I then did a follow-up question: which group does your preferred solution harm more: transgender women and girls, or cisgender women and girls? The answer here was obvious: your policy harms both groups, but harms transgender women and girls much more.

Whoa! Just goes to show, one never knows, does one? Never say "never"!

I am certainly more pro-LDS than not. I would simply like to offer my thought. Putting statues, paintings, or mentions of Christ in the buildings and literature would not be nearly as effective, (in my opinion—nothing more) until the Church itself emphasizes Christ more than it emphasizes itself. I think I hear more about "the Church is" than I do about "Christ is." Of course, I say that from the place that my primary spiritual identity is as a Christian first and foremost. My Evangelical identity is a distant second and describes (when accurately understood) the branch of Christianity to which I belong. A distant third is my affiliation (membership) within Christianity, which most recently has been Mennonite. Ok, and while I am in trouble, I would suggest that the beauty of a temple would never create within me more of a desire to worship there, than would a simple building. I guess that is my country and Mennonite roots. My guess is that Christ would have been more comfortable in the latter than the former. I submit that in the same spirit that I recommend the missionaries get better training in missiology before hitting the road. I want the LDS Church to draw people to Christ, not to itself. I would love for the LDS Church to better minister to people based on the truths of their lives, not based on the truth, however unique or not, of the organization. In our village there is a massive gap between the spiritual need and the spiritual thirst. No one is filling that gap (not any church, at least). Our new village priest came to visit us last week, but like the LDS missionaries, he didn't ask a single question about us or the truths we are living with right now. He pretty much got right into his truth . . . . They need new pews to make the sanctuary more comfortable. Our needs? Not so much.

So they don't get fined by the government for failure to provide access to wheelchairs?

I think the 7–10% is model error on natal sex, not a percentage we can characterize as “these people are trans.” If transgender people’s brains tracked identified sex, the model would have failed on them when scored against natal sex. It did not. Accuracy for trans people was in the same ~90–93% band as for everyone else. That means most trans scans were still called male if the person was male, female if female. The misses are the same overlap you get with any male/female brain classifier: size-controlled features still go across the two groups. Here's the quote I have in mind: After they stopped the model from using brain size, they asked: "Do trans people’s scores drift toward the 'identified' sex?" For trans men there was a weak wiggle in that direction in one sample (not statistically significant). For trans women, that drift did not show up. Also, 7-10% of adults are not transgender. I don't think we can place “many trans people” in that gap and treat the gap as identity. The study did not take the cis people it got wrong and ask whether they had a trans identity. That would be a different paper. The study showed that if they strip out head size, the scan still follows sex, including in the trans sample. The leftover 7–10% is not a third sex, and it is not a head-count of people whose "identity" is their sex. It is ordinary classifier error plus overlap between male and female brains. Thanks, -Smac

Just want to point out that the 7-10% gap is large enough to be able to include many transgender people. If there were non-trans men/women that were incorrectly identified, it would be interesting to compare their self-identity to trans men/women. Is there something that the 7-10% gap that shows up in self-identity?

Thank you. I had already looked at both. They do not show that “brain scans prove a female brain in a male,” which I think is the wishful thinking / urban-legend version on display in this thread. The ScienceDaily article from 2018 is not a journal paper. It is a conference write-up of Julie Bakker’s ECE talk. The headline, that “transgender brains are more like their desired gender from an early age,” goes beyond, I think, the abstract. Structure was already hedged as “more similar, but not identical, to those typical of the desired gender of GD boys and girls.” The second link is a real paper and better than the press release. Kurth and colleagues scanned 24 men, 24 women, and 24 "trans women" who had not taken hormones. A computer model scored each brain on a male-to-female scale (men averaging 1, women averaging 0). The trans women’s average score was 0.75, which is a bit less typically male than the men, but still much closer to the men than to the women. The sample size was small. The authors also acknowledge that sexual orientation might be mixing in the result, and that bigger studies are needed. These findings are compatible with “some average features sit between,” which is what I have been saying. I think these findings are not compatible with “the brain matches the identified sex” or “sex is a spectrum.” A 0.75 on a 0–1 male–female axis shows that "trans women" are still on the male side of the overlap, which overlap we already know exists in every large brain-sex study. I found this article worthwhile: Accurate sex prediction of cisgender and transgender individuals without brain size bias (Scientific Reports (2023)). These guys trained a computer to guess sex from MRI scans. A lazy model just uses brain size (men’s brains are larger on average). They built models that do not cheat that way. Those "debiased" models still guessed male vs female correctly about 90–93% of the time, both for non-trans men and women and for transgender people. Accuracy was similar in both groups. In other words, once you ignore head size, the scan still tracks natal sex, not the subjective "identified" sex. It did have some limits: the trans samples were small, and the study classifies group patterns, not “this one brain is female.” I am not dismissing MRI studies. I am declining to go along with the slogan the scans are asked to carry. These two sources are why. If the next paper shows a pre-hormone sample where trans women are indistinguishable from cis women on a size-controlled classifier, that would move the needle. These two do not. Thank you for sharing these articles. -Smac

As an introvert I’m totally ok with them reinventing the wheel on my account.

I did not say people with DSDs “have to represent a third sex.” In fact, I said the opposite: they don’t, and treating them as proof of a sex spectrum is the move I reject. Two different claims get mixed: A) Some people are born with atypical sex development. True. They are still male, female, or a disordered mix of those two pathways—not a third sex. B) Therefore sex is a spectrum, or “male/female is overly simplistic,” so identity can sit anywhere on that smear. That is the inference I called a motte-and-bailey when it is used in trans arguments. The motte is “look, DSDs exist.” The bailey is “so a typical male who identifies as a woman is just another point on the spectrum.” If you are only defending A, we agree. If you think A does the work of B, that is the argument—not a straw man of patients. People with DSDs did not ask to be the exhibit. Leave them out of the identity fight unless the policy is actually about their care. They actually often are. There is overlap, yes. But the groups are quite distinct from each other. The members of one group have DSDs, and the members of the other group have gender dysphoria. There are some people from the first group who overlap with the second, but the first group is numerically much smaller, so the actual number of overlapping persons would, I think, be fairly small. Happy to consider any source you have about this. I don't think it does. Right at the outset, the Handbook quotes Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." No reference to a third sex or a spectrum. 38.7.7 is a different heading: people whose sex at birth is not clear. That is the DSD/ambiguous-development case. It tells leaders to use compassion and to take questions to the First Presidency. It does not say those members are the same population as males and females with typical anatomy who identify as the opposite sex. Well, no. The binary is not something I "want." It is something I acknowledge. 2+2=4 is correct because that is how math works, not because I "want" a particular answer. But even if I grant the characterization, I would say I want a binary because that is what the reproductive classes are. Showing a rare developmental disorder is not an exception that refutes the classes. It is the motte again: when the subject is identity in a clearly sexed body, DSDs are a different file. The Handbook keeps those files apart. So should we. I don't think this has happened. And again, I think you are only bringing these folks up as a motte and bailey tactic. Some with a DSD also have dysphoria. I acknowledge the overlap between the two separate groups ("overlap" in that there are persons who have both a DSD and gender dysphoria). This does not make “look, intersex exists” an answer to whether an unambiguously male person is a woman. Exceptions in development are not a license to treat typical sex as optional, and they are not “shifting along a spectrum.” They are medical anomalies in a two-sex system. Again, this is all motte-and-bailey stuff. Some do. I concede the point. I overstated the distinction between the two separate groups, as there are some individuals who overlap (who have, for example, CAH or CAIS and gender dysphoria). The vast majority of people with GD, however, are unambiguously male or female. Which is something sporting leagues can figure out. It is not some massive conundrum that is threatening to uproot society unless we have a moral panic over it. I agree the leagues are the right place to set the rule (though legislative participation is likely going to be also necessary). Many of them have already set it: women’s categories are for females. That is not a mystery waiting on a DSD seminar. There is no symmetric rush of trans men into elite men’s events, because the performance gap runs one way. Even the WNBA (!!!) appears to be refusing to allow men to participate. “Massive conundrum” and “uproot society” are your phrases, not mine. I said a narrower thing: pointing at DSDs does not tell you whether a male belongs on a women’s team. If you think that question is small, fine—then don’t inflate my sentence into a panic. If you think it is small, you should also not need DSDs as a shield when the category is being rewritten. Again, leagues can figure it out. Several have: sex is the line. That is the opposite of a moral panic. It is the point of having a women’s division. Atypical development does not make the classes fuzzy. It makes some bodies within the two classes harder to sort. That is the difference. If a factory builds two distinct models of a widget and a few units come off the line with mixed parts, you do not conclude the company makes a "spectrum" of models. You conclude the line glitched. So it is with DSDs, which are are disorders of the male or female pathway. They are not a divine hint that sex was meant to be a smear, and they are not the same fact as a typical male saying he is a woman. And again, people with DSDs are only referenced in this discussions as part of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. We all know that these discussions are really about people with gender dysphoria. As for God, I am not claiming the Lord is “obsessed” with your wording. I am claiming he made male and female (Genesis 1:27), and that the Church treats biological sex at birth as the meaning of "gender" in the Family Proclamation. Not subjective self-identity, and not a DSD exhibit. Rare medical anomalies do not rewrite that, and they do not smuggle self-ID into the same box. If your point is only “creation includes suffering and variation,” well, amen to that. If your point is “therefore the binary is a human fetish,” that does not follow from either the biology or the doctrine. Maybe you should look into the data behind things instead of posting propaganda articles. I have looked at the data. That is why I do not say that brain scans show a spectrum of biological sex. What the scans show is more modest. Average male and female brains differ on some measures, with large overlap. Some studies of transgender people find a few regions or task responses shifted toward the identified sex; reviews still find most structure tracking natal sex, especially before hormones. A 2023 classifier that stripped out brain-size bias still sorted male vs female at high accuracy in transgender people too. None of that is a "spectrum" or a third sex or a slider of sexes. Sex is a reproductive class. Brains are not a second set of gonads. If you have a specific paper that you think shows sex itself is a spectrum, I would like to read it. Could you post a link? Otherwise, “look at the data” is not a finding. The data I have seen does not do the work you are assigning it. I hold Dan in fairly high regard as to matters within his niche expertise and province (biblical stuff). That said, it's not like he's some sort of polymath. Putting aside his training and scholarship about the Bible, Dan is just another guy, so his personal opinions and politics only get the weight and influence I choose to lend them. And having personally interacted with Dan, and having watched him intermingle his neomarxist sociopolitical views into topics well outside his area of expertise, I'm not really inclined to grant Dan much credibility. That said, I watched the video. I can grant the part that matters for kindness and still reject what I see as the leap. First, the feeling is real. People with gender dysphoria often describe themselves as a mind in the wrong body. Distress, body dissatisfaction, and wanting the body to look like the identified sex are documented. Nobody serious should say they are “making it up.” Phantom-limb pain is real pain. That does not mean the missing hand is still there as a legal or biological fact. Second, the hypothetical is not the same fact. Destiny’s story is an actual brain transplant: Rob’s brain, with Rob’s memories and male development, is put into a female body. That would be a genuine mismatch of one person’s nervous system with another person’s organism. Gender dysphoria is not that. No one has swapped a “female brain” into a male. Instead, what we have is a male or female body plus a persistent self-model that does not match it and is incongruent with reality. Treating the report as if it were a transplant is the move. Dan says the thought experiment “closely mirrors how people talk.” Talk is not ontology. Third, cognitive science of the self does not settle sex. Selves are constructed, extended, sometimes misaligned with the visible body. Fine. The same literature explains eating disorders, body-integrity dysphoria, and optical illusions. The checker-shadow clip actually cuts against your position, because it shows that perception can be both experienced and yet still wrong in a systematic way. The two shades of gray are the same, and an individual's misperception of that does not mean they are different. It just means that people can genuinely misperceive things. The mind can generate a powerful error. The question is whether policy and medicine should affirm that there are actually two shades of gray (because, in Dan's and your view, perception trumps reality), or do we treat the distress and misperceptions arising from gender dysphoria, and do so in ways that do not involve denying reality and rewriting sex. Fourth, phantom limb cuts the other way. Ramachandran did not conclude the clenched fist actually existed and that we must legally recognize a second hand. He used a mirror to update the map. If the analogy is serious, it supports changing the representation or reducing pain—not declaring the natal body a clerical mistake. Dan's earnestness is, in a way, admirable. He's quite passionate: "This is an experiment that people have a sense of gender identity, that they experience as real because that is what their mind is generating. That is not in alignment with their birth-assigned sex. That creates that incongruence that is sometimes described as feeling like you're in the wrong body." This is all well and good. Not even in dispute. Virtually axiomatic, really. What Dan is apparently trying to do, though, is act as if this genuine experience - which is a misperception of and departure from reality - should be treated as if it is reflective of reality. There is, I think, no other mental health disorder that receives this kind of irrational deference and acceptance and endorsement and celebration. For example, we do not treat the 15 year anorexic girl that weighs 85 pounds like she is fat even though she truly has a 'sense' and 'perception' that she is overweight. We do not endorse her incongruent-with-reality perception. So why do we privilege the phenomenon regarding incongruent-with-reality perception and "identity" of sex, but not false perceptions as to body weight or age or species or height? The privilege is, I think, purely a product of long-term strategies and pressure tactics. And boy, it sure seems to be succeeding with a lot of people. But it's also not holding up well. I've repeatedly analogized the effort to The Emperor's New Clothes, and I think that may be happening more. Fifth, the papers do not show what the closer needs. “Own-body processing aligns with gender identity” and similar Amsterdam/clinic studies are the same small, mixed, often post-social-transition or hormone-confounded literature we already went over. They do not show a female brain in a male. Reviews still find most structure tracking natal sex. Size-controlled classifiers still read sex. An encyclopedia entry on body image is not a finding that "sex" is "identity." Sixth, the moral ending is not evidence. The neomarxist political screed in the video is yet another reason to not really take Dan's say-so as influential or reasoned. “Harmful, hateful, people die, only trying to exist” skips the dispute: whether the right response to incongruence is to treat the person as the opposite sex in law and sport. We can want people alive and cared for and still say a male is not a woman. Those are not the same sentence. If Dan has a study that identifies sex as identity rather than as reproductive class, that is the paper to present to the world. I would sure like to read it. A list of body-image citations plus a gratuitous ad hominem insult is not that paper. Intersex people prove this. There are lots of studies about them. You are being deliberately dense. Well, no. AFAICS, this is just wishful thinking. DSD studies document atypical development. They do not document extra sexes. What these papers measure is things like CAH, CAIS, Klinefelter, Turner, ovotesticular DSD: chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that did not follow the usual script. That is a medical literature. It is not a finding that sex is a slider with many stops. Every single DSD is a disorder of the two-sex system. None of them is a third sex. There is no third gamete in that stack of studies. “Lots of studies about them” is both true and beside the point. Lots of studies about polydactyly do not prove that a human's number of fingers is a "spectrum" of hand-kinds. Variation and injury inside a two-class system are not a spectrum of classes. If you have a paper that identifies a third reproductive sex in humans (not a DSD, not a hormone curve, not an identity), I hope you will cite it and present a link to it. As it is, “look at intersex” is the motte-and-bailey fallacy again. There are only two sexes and I can prove it because there are males and females and others that don’t fit neatly into either category. You do realize how ridiculous that sounds right? It only sounds ridiculous if you hear a third sex in the third clause (re: DSDs). That is not what I am saying. Male and female are the two classes. “Disordered mix of those two pathways” is a description of a broken instance of the same system—not a third class, not “neither,” and not “other” as a sex. Let's examine two human hands, left and right. A person born with a malformed blend of left- and right-sided structures on one limb has not revealed a third kind of hand. They have a rare error in a two-sided plan. “Don’t fit neatly” is about our paperwork and first glance, not about a new reproductive type. No third gamete appears in that sentence. Your attempt at ridicule works by swapping “hard to sort” for “extra sex.” I did not make that swap. If the claim you want to mock is “there are three sexes,” find someone who said it. I said there are two, and a handful of disordered mixes of those two. That is not a punchline. It is the same binary with the medical footnote attached. Argument by assertion. Well, I assume you are aware of my fairly extensive prior posting history about this. See, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. I have posted links to quite a few articles over the years, so the "argument by assertion" critique doesn't really hold. A sampling of articles/studies/sources which have influenced (and are generally compatible with) my views: The New Evolution Deniers (Colin Wright, Quillette) Sex Is Not a Spectrum (Reality’s Last Stand) The Dangerous Denial of Sex (Reality’s Last Stand / Wright, Hilton, et al.) A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary (Wall Street Journal) Race Is a Spectrum, Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary (Areo) Once Again: Why Sex Is Binary (Jerry Coyne) A Defense of the Binary in Human Sex (Coyne) Nature Conflates Sex and Gender (Coyne) Evolution societies’ misleading statement about sex (Coyne) How Common Is Intersex? A Response to Anne Fausto-Sterling (Leonard Sax) Intersex: What It Is and Is Not (CMDA) Intersex: What It Is and Is Not (Moral Revolution) ISNA: What’s the difference between being transgender or transsexual and having an intersex condition? BioEssays paper on sex (Wiley; binary/developmental-pathway line) PMC article on sex/DSD framing Danish / Dutch AIS prevalence studies · 2001 Dutch AIS · 2016 Danish 46,XY females UCSF: Disorders of Sex Development (clinical, not identity) BMJ rapid responses to Alpert et al. (Gender Dysphoria Alliance, Phillips, Fisken, Curtis, Dahlen, etc.) BMJ replies to article seeking to remove biological sex as a medical classification FAIR: Does intersex/GD/trans invalidate eternal male/female gender? FAIR: Mormonism and transgenderism General Handbook 38 (Church policies, including sex-at-birth rules) National Review: Rachel McKinnon / women’s sport National Review: Scottish rapist and gender-law reforms Woman’s Place UK (sex-based rights / sport and spaces) I have also addressed articles/studies/sources which disagree with my views: Disorders of sex development: a new definition and classification (Genetics in Medicine / Nature, 2007) — “sex is just as complicated…” Sex redefined (Claire Ainsworth, Nature) Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic (Scientific American reprint) Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum (Scientific American blog) Rethinking sex-assigned-at-birth questions (Alpert et al., BMJ) A Conversation with Anne Fausto-Sterling (New York Times) How sexually dimorphic are we? (Fausto-Sterling et al., Journal of Sex Research) Is Sex Binary? Let’s Look at the Biology (The Logic of Science — argues against a strict binary) Sex in humans may not be binary, but it’s surely bimodal (Coyne quoting/engaging the “bimodal” line) ScienceVet thread on sex as a complex/non-strict binary Lia Thomas: “I belong on the women’s team” (Daily Beast) NPR transcript you linked (identity-affirming news frame) ISNA frequency FAQ (uses the broad ~1.7% intersex figure) Nonbinary Wiki: Third gender Germany “third gender” law California SB 201 (intersex surgery / identity-adjacent statute) Again, I would welcome any articles/studies/sources you feel I should consider. This is not a mutual feeling. I find your facile rhetoric insulting and dangerous to the lives and wellbeing of people I care about. I hope you will follow the advice Dan gives at the end of the above video. I am sorry you experience our interactions that way. I do not intend insult, and I do not wish harm on anyone you care about. I have been working over the last several months to improve my online communications, largely following Steven Collis's "Habits of a Peacemaker." So far my efforts have been far from perfect. I will work to improve. That said, I will not take Dan’s closing advice. “Stop talking” is not a reply to arguments that disagree with his - or your - sociopolitical and other views and opinions. I can keep the temperature down and still say what I think is true: sex is a binary, dysphoria is real, and those are not the same fact. If that itself is what you find "dangerous," I think we'll have to live with that. I will try to stay measured. I hope you will too. I will not pretend the disagreement is hatred so that the only moral option is silence. Thanks, -Smac

I understand some people need that, I'm just the weirdo. I'm not demanding they reinvent the wheel on my account.

Here’s two to get you started. Pretty easy to find, though the science is developing still of course…they need more and larger studies that control for various variables, imo, but it’s something that shouldn’t be dismissed outright. MRI research studies are expensive, so it is understandable why this isn’t something immediately determined. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180524112351.htm https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8955456/

Yes, I’m not a fan of the social obligations either. Church culture is a bit harder for introverts.

So suddenly they have to represent a third sex for them to show a spectrum. Straw man. Silly. Facile. Dumb argument. They actually often are. The Church Handbook even acknowledges this. You’re reaching. You want a strict binary. You are shown exceptions to that strict binary. You say that those more obvious exceptions aren’t always the same people as those wanting to shift along the spectrum in defiance of the binary. This is projection. You insist that there is a strict binary and then retreat to these kinds of breezy arguments to try to invalidate the obvious exceptions without actually dealing with them. Some do. Which is something sporting leagues can figure out. It is not some massive conundrum that is threatening to uproot society unless we have a moral panic over it. They make the binary look fuzzy because they objectively show that the binary is fuzzy. That if there is a God that God obviously isn’t nearly as obsessed with correlating humans into that strict binary as you want Him to be. Maybe you should look into the data behind things instead of posting propaganda articles. Here is Dan McClellan talking a bit about this with references along with dealing with other pieces of transphobic nonsense. Intersex people prove this. There are lots of studies about them. You are being deliberately dense. There are only two sexes and I can prove it because there are males and females and others that don’t fit neatly into either category. You do realize how ridiculous that sounds right? Argument by assertion. This is not a mutual feeling. I find your facile rhetoric insulting and dangerous to the lives and wellbeing of people I care about. I hope you will follow the advice Dan gives at the end of the above video.

Maybe demand in Utah will slow down a bit for winter. I hope so, because I need to downsize before they start falling off of me and it’s getting close to the point of where I can’t put it off any longer.

Update: we are in Layton UT and we accidentally ended up at Deseret Book a couple minutes before they opened. We weren’t trying to be there when they unlocked the doors, just trying to get that “to-do” item marked off the list. There was a line in the parking lot! We were so confused. I was finally able to buy a few of the open sleeve option which was great. I grabbed 4-5 items and got in line to pay with two people ahead of me. By the time I got to the register and finished paying there were probably 20 people in line behind me! And they were all older men and women (40-60 age range by the look of it). The popularity of these new options is not about young girls wanting to wear more “revealing” clothes.

8 1/2 years later, I've never regretted my decision. It's been an incredible blessing to my family.

Is everyone who posted okay with this thread disappearing? I will request it, if so, though nemesis may still leave it.

We've had to pick up things locally and ship them.

I was attempting to respond to the substance of your comments. Well, there's a bit to unpack here. Two different fights are being tied together, i.e., if I care about women’s spaces I must also own every bad actor you associate with that camp. I don’t. Spaces. Male-only clubs and boardrooms are not the same thing as women’s bathrooms, shelters, changing rooms, prisons, and sports. Those latter categories were built—often by women, and by reformers who thought sexed bodies matter—because undressing, sleeping, and competing with the other sex is not a neutral arrangement. That some men had private clubs first does not decide who belongs in locker room or a rape-crisis shelter. In my view, reciting history of the exclusion of women from men’s institutions/spaces is not an argument that women’s institutions/spaces should include males. Motives. Some people use “think of the women” as a slogan and do not care about women in any other context. Granted. That does not make the sex-based rule false. A hypocrite can still point at a real conflict: males in female sport and female prisons. I can oppose that without signing up for a program on gay adoption, or for restricting women’s legal rights. I propose that we judge the rule, rather than impose some sort of purity test on anyone who states it. LGB. Same-sex attraction is attraction to sex. That is not a mythos. It is why “lesbian” meant female and “gay man” meant male. In contrast, "gender identity" as an override of sex is a later claim, and it collides with that definition. You can support gay people and still say sexed categories are not bigotry. Those are not the same “community” with one set of interests. Treating dissent on identity as an attack on gay people is the blend that does not really work. If the charge is “your coalition is inconsistent,” say which coalition and which policy. If the charge is that sex-based spaces have no legitimate purpose, that is the argument. Motives and adjacent culture-war items do not settle it. Thanks, -Smac

I have repeatedly acknowledged that there are persons with DSDs, but they do not represent a third sex. DSD talk in these debates is usually a motte-and-bailey fallacy. The bailey (what the argument is actually about) is people whose sex is not in doubt: a male who subjectively "identifies" as a woman (and vice versa), and who want the law, sport, prisons, medicine, and language to treat them as if they are the opposite sex. The motte (the easy position to retreat to when challenged on the above) is what you are attempting here: “Sex is complicated—look at intersex / DSDs.” DSDs are real medical conditions in which sex development is atypical. They are rare. They are not a third sex. They are not “gender identity.” Almost none of the policy fights are about how to treat a newborn with ambiguous genitalia. Those two groups are not the same population. A man with gender dysphoria does not have CAH or CAIS. Pointing to a DSD does not help decide whether males belong in women’s sports. Such references are intended to make the binary look fuzzier than it is, then smuggle the "subjective self identity" claim made by persons whose sex is unequivocal back in as if it were the same fact. We can have a serious conversation about clinical care for DSDs. You can have a serious conversation about sex, identity, and single-sex spaces. Mixing them amounts to the motte-and-bailey fallacy: defend identity rules by gesturing at medical anomalies, then, when the anomaly is granted, return to “trans women are women.” If the topic is identity in an unambiguously sexed body, I think we should say that. I think we should leave people with DSDs out of it unless the policy is actually about them. I really haven't quoted religious sources in this thread. Overwhelmingly, my religious faith is quite compatible with my understanding of reality. I don't think I have done that. I have not done that either. A spectrum of biological sex? Brain scans have "showed" this? I'm not sure that is accurate. I sure would like to see "studies" which "show ... there is a spectrum {of biological sex}." I respectfully reject that claim. 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. I'm not persuaded that this is an accurate statement. I did pick a lane. You are running two sentences together. My lane: Sex is a binary. Male and female. Two reproductive classes. Not a spectrum of sexes. The lane I am critiquing, but not driving in: Traits associated with sex (hormones, height, genital development) can vary in degree. Variation around two sexes is not a third sex and not “sex is a spectrum.” Height varies. That does not make “adult” a spectrum of sexes. If I have granted “spectrum” at all, it was for those traits, not for sex. That is the same distinction as adult/child vs age. I am not switching lanes. I am refusing to let “traits vary” mean “there are not two sexes.” So: binary for sex. Continua for some measurements. Those are not the same claim. The “pick a lane” line only works if you treat them as the same word. I do not. Although we, as per usual, strongly disagree, I do appreciate your generally measured responses and comments. I think we communicate more meaningfully when we both attempt to go that way. I will work to improve myself. Thanks, -Smac

https://www.deseret.com/faith/2026/08/26/church-statement-on-great-salt-lake-and-regional-drought/ This is an update in an official statement issued directly by the Church on August 26, 2026, titled "Statement on Regional Drought and the Great Salt Lake." The Church renewed a public call for water conservation to assist the critically low levels of the Great Salt Lake. Officials highlighted ongoing conservation projects, including donating and leasing nearly 30,000 acre-feet of water to the lake and installing smart irrigation controllers across thousands of Church properties in the Intermountain West. What is the problem, again? The Great Salt Lake is facing prolonged, severe decline caused by decades of diversion for agriculture, industry, and municipal expansion that became compounded by an ongoing regional drought. The consequences of a shrinking lake are severe. The lake is a vital stopping point for millions of migratory birds. Reduced water levels increase salinity to levels that threaten brine shrimp and fly populations, which form the base of the food chain. The exposed lakebed contains high concentrations of both naturally occurring and industrial heavy metals, such as arsenic and lead. As the water recedes, winds kick up toxic dust that poses serious public health risks to residents along the Wasatch Front. The lake supports multi-billion-dollar industries, including mineral extraction, brine shrimp harvesting, and ski tourism (which relies heavily on lake-effect snow). What is the Church doing? Because the Church owns substantial land holdings, agricultural acreage, and thousands of facilities across Utah, its water rights and usage practices carry significant weight. The Church updated its conservation record and renewed a public call for stewardship. The Church has permanently donated or leased nearly 30,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake making it one of the largest single water donors to the lake to date. This includes donating thousands of shares in the North Point Consolidated Irrigation Company to ensure water flows perpetually into the lake and surrounding wetlands. Across the Intermountain West, the Church has installed over 3,100 smart irrigation controllers (about 1,700 within the Great Salt Lake Basin itself) to prevent overwatering at meetinghouses, temples, and welfare farms. The Church is actively converting turf grass to drought-tolerant, water-wise landscaping at hundreds of meetinghouses and historic sites. Landscape overhaul projects at Temple Square alone are expected to save up to 20 million gallons of water annually once completed. Church leadership released formal statements urging members to reduce personal residential landscape watering, adopt water-wise habits, and support community conservation initiatives. Who else is helping? The Utah State Government legislature established the Great Salt Lake Commissioner’s office and allocated hundreds of millions of dollars toward water banking, split-season leasing, and agricultural optimization. State programs also offer turf-buyback rebates for homeowners replacing grass lawns. Organizations like the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust (co-managed by the National Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy) work directly with water rights holders to acquire and direct water into the lake's tributaries. Local farmers and irrigation companies are adopting precision drip systems and automated piping to reduce runoff and voluntarily lease unused water. Researchers from the University of Utah, Utah State University, and BYU provide hydrological modeling to track air quality and water inflows. Will it fix the problem? Current measures are slowing the decline and building critical infrastructure, but conservation alone will not fully "fix" the lake. The influx of dedicated water rights guarantees a baseline volume of water reaches the lake every year rather than being diverted to fields or subdivisions. Hydrologists and state officials emphasize that human conservation and policy changes can only bridge the gap. Long-term stabilization requires sustained, above-average winter snowpack in the Wasatch Mountains. Any succession of dry winters can quickly offset years of conserved water. Church leaders acknowledged this reality in their statement, noting that while conservation efforts are vital moral and civic duties, an ultimate recovery ultimately relies on weather patterns and increased precipitation.

The Lake District is definitely a great place, especially when the weather is good. The town of Kendal, seems to be the main starting point for visitors.