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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.

Exactly. Fixed it.

I’ve been considering whether these are two of the most boring questions in the history of this board: Are trans women women? Are Mormons Christian? They are boring because, standing alone, they are arguments about definitions masquerading as arguments about reality. If Christian means someone whose religion centers on Jesus Christ, then Mormons are obviously Christians. If Christian means someone who accepts the historic creeds and orthodox doctrines of traditional Christianity, then Mormons are not Christians. Nothing about Mormonism changed when we switched definitions. We simply moved the boundary around the category Christian. The same problem infects the question, “What is a woman?” That question has become a political gotcha. If an educated person hesitates before answering it, some people take the hesitation as proof that higher education has rendered the person incapable of recognizing something a five-year-old understands. Either that, or the person has joined an ideological conspiracy to redefine woman and subvert Western civilization. There is a more mundane explanation: modern biology is considerably more complicated than the elementary-school model of male and female. Male and female are real and extraordinarily useful biological categories. Of course. But biological sex is manifested through a collection of characteristics: chromosomes, sex-determining genes, gonads, internal and external reproductive anatomy, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, and reproductive function. These characteristics cluster overwhelmingly into two patterns. Of course. But it is also true that they do not line up perfectly in every human being. That is why Nature publishes articles like “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic,” and Scientific American publishes things like “Beyond XX and XY: The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination,” and “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary.” Nobody involved has forgotten that ovaries and testes exist. They are describing the actual biology of sexual development. Human males and females are, at the genetic level, overwhelmingly alike. The dramatic differences between typical male and female bodies arise because a relatively small set of genetic signals initiates developmental cascades with enormous downstream consequences. Early in development, the embryonic gonad can develop along either an ovarian or testicular pathway. Signals within the sex-development network push development predominantly down one pathway or the other, after which genes, hormones, receptors, and other developmental processes produce the familiar primary and secondary sex characteristics of male and female bodies. That is a useful consciousness-raiser. Male and female bodies are not two unrelated biological designs. They are variations produced from overwhelmingly shared developmental machinery. Other vertebrates give us even stranger examples. Clownfish can change reproductive sex as adults. When the dominant female of a group disappears, a male can undergo coordinated changes in hormones, gonads, and reproductive function and literally becomes female. Biology is under no obligation to conform to the categories that seem intuitively obvious to us. Then human beings add another layer. We have elaborate psychological and social concepts of men and women: how people dress and wear their hair, how they speak and move, whether boys are encouraged to be tough and girls nurturing, which interests and occupations are coded masculine or feminine, how people present themselves to others, how others perceive them, and their own internal sense of themselves as men or women. Some of these patterns have biological influences. Some are cultural. Most probably involve both. All of them are real features of human psychology and social life. For most people, these dimensions line up so neatly that we never have to think about them separately. A person develops along the typical female reproductive pathway, develops female secondary sex characteristics, grows up thinking of herself as a girl and then a woman, presents herself as a woman, and is perceived and treated by everyone else as a woman. Everything points in the same direction. Intersex people and transgender people are both consciousness-raising for the same reason: they force us to notice that these dimensions are separable. And that is where the interesting questions begin. In a doctor’s office, chromosomes, anatomy, hormone exposure, reproductive history, and every other aspect of biological reality may matter enormously. In competitive sports, particular physiological characteristics may matter. In prisons, bathrooms, driver’s licenses, workplaces, marriages, cocktail parties, and ordinary conversation, we are dealing with different purposes, different interests, and different facts. There is no reason to expect one definition of woman to draw the optimal bright line across every one of these situations. When a person says “a trans-woman is a woman" they are not claiming that a trans woman has ovaries, produces ova, has XX chromosomes, or somehow rewrote her embryological history. Nor are they claiming that this creates an inalienable right to enter every women’s space, compete in every women’s sport, be housed in every women’s prison, or override whatever interests led society to create female-only categories in the first place. Those are separate policy questions, and each has to be argued on its own merits. Rather, they are using woman as a gender and social category rather than exclusively as a synonym for adult human biological female. They are saying that, for the ordinary purposes of relating to another human being, a person’s persistent identity, presentation, social role, and way of living matter more than the developmental history of their gonads. There is nothing scientifically incoherent about that. It is simply the judgment that, in ordinary social life, a person’s gender identity and gender expression are more relevant to how they understand themselves and relate to others than the biology of their gonads. It is a choice about which characteristics should define a psychological and social category when the purpose itself is psychological or social. You can find that definition unhelpful and choose not to use the word that way. You can believe biological sex should control medicine, sports, prisons, bathrooms, or any other context you can justify. You can make exceptions for people whose bodies do not fit the typical male or female pattern because of variations in sex development while refusing to make similar accommodations based on gender identity. Those are coherent positions. We can debate them. But when you refuse to make a serious effort to understand what other people are saying, insist on importing your own definitions into their conceptual framework, and repeatedly interpret their language in the least charitable way—for example, treating “assigned at birth” as carrying some subversive ideological implication rather than its well-defined medical definition—it becomes difficult to see any path toward a productive, good-faith conversation. Which brings us back to Mormons and Christians. We can spend another 200 pages arguing about which definition is the real one. Or we can define our terms, identify the actual interests at stake, look at the evidence, and argue about something interesting.

Exactly!!! The incongruity of an 18-year old kid from Utah being an old man or the leader of a tribe is incongruous with obvious reality, the completely normal thing to do is assume that isn’t what the speaker is trying to imply. The same heuristics are in play with the words we are talking about here. For example: ...therefore the speaker is almost certainly using definitions of these words other than the ones that lead to the factually incoherent, incoherent, and incongruous conclusions I originally came to, so I have to figure out what the speaker meant. Going through your examples: “Assigned at birth” is a well-defined medical term and means exactly what the National Academy says it means. the “factually and linguistically incoherent” part is what you (uncharitably) assume other imply. “Sex is a spectrum”. This is absolutely, positively, a coherent scientific view of sex. For example, Professor Augstin Fuentes of Princeton University wrote an article entitled Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary in Scientific American, or Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic that was originally published in Nature and republished in in Scientific American. Fuentes wrote: So if we are going to make a good-faith effort to understand what people are saying, if they say “sex is binary” they are probably referring to gametes. If they say “sex is a spectrum” they are probably talking about the “range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge." So while from a logical standpoint the statements “sex is binary” and “sex is a spectrum” contradict each other, this viewpoint is naive and scientifically illiterate. Both sentences are true because they use slightly different definitions of the word “sex.” If you insist on believing sex only refers to how organisms make gametes and that it cannot refer to the complexity inherent in sexual phenotypes, then you are being just as obstinate as the anti-Mormon who insists “elder” cannot refer to an 18-year old kid because referring to such a person as an “elder” is factually and linguistically incoherent. "Sex is a social construct.” I understand how this could sound nonsensical, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious, scientific, internally consist viewpoint. In a 2024 survey, 42% of biologists agree that yes, sex is socially constructed. What they mean by that isn’t that gonads aren’t real. Rather, they mean humans choose how to characterize and combine genomic, gonadal, hormonal, morphological, and other biological components when assigning sex categories. "A woman is anyone who 'identifies' as one.” A 2025 National Academies Consensus Study Report uses this definition: "Women: The terms “female” and “woman” are used differently according to context and perspective, which may cause confusion. In this report, the definition of women goes beyond the sex and gender binary and includes all people who identify as a woman or girl, solely or in addition to other gender identities and regardless of biological sex traits. This inclusive definition recognizes individuals who have been or may be affected by a set of biological and/or social variables that influence women differently than men across the life course." This isn’t a claim. It is a definition. Just because this definition contradicts another definition doesn't mean it is factually and linguistically incoherent, any more than the fact that 18 year-old elders not being old means that that definition is factually and linguistically incoherent. "Trans women are women.” Again, this is a definition, not a claim. This one is used repeatedly in mainstream science. For example, CDC Guidelines say, “transgender women are women who were assigned male sex at birth." Note that according to the dictionary, definition 1 of woman is “an adult female person,” and that the first definition of “female” is “having or relating to a gender identity that corresponds to a complex, variable set of social and cultural roles, traits, and behaviors assigned to people of the sex that typically produces egg cells." You seem to think that if somebody says “I am a woman because I identify as such” means that they are claiming that by identifying as a woman, the cells in their bodies magically transform into something else. That viewpoint is incoherent, and it isn’t what they are actually claiming.

Of the 20 load-bearing principles you listed, the following are false: 1,2,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 The only ones that are basically true are 3 (your gender identity is valid on its own) and 7 (you should use people’s preferred pronouns). My basis for this was comparing your hostile anti-trans propaganda list to the web page “Supporting Transgender People" on the transequality.org website. It is striking how what they are actually asking for is so different than what you claim they are asking for. I asked GPT to compare your list to what is on that website and it came up with this: If we use Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE / transequality.org) as the benchmark, the redline is pretty dramatic. One caveat: A4TE itself says there is “no one way to be a ‘perfect’ ally”, so strictly speaking it does not present a doctrinal entrance exam. But its Supporting Transgender People page is explicitly a guide to allyship, so it gives us a reasonable test: does Grok’s proposition actually appear as something an ally is expected to believe or do?(Trans Equality) Here is Grok’s list with everything unsupported by that standard struck out. I’ve left unstruck only the portions that substantially correspond to A4TE’s actual guidance. Here is a descriptive list of claims that function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary “trans” advocacy — especially the institutional/activist version that treats dissent as bigotry or “denial of existence.” Not every trans person holds all of them. The point is which ones are treated as non-negotiable in that framework. Core identity claims Gender identity is real, innate, and authoritative. A person’s stated identity is the primary fact about whether they are a man, woman, both, or neither. A4TE instead says: You do not have to understand someone’s identity to respect it. It does not require an ally to believe gender identity is innate or metaphysically authoritative. (Trans Equality) Identity is sex (or replaces sex for social/legal purposes). “Trans women are women” / “trans men are men” is treated as a literal truth, not a courtesy or a political slogan. Nothing resembling this appears as a requirement for allyship. Self-identification is sufficient. No medical diagnosis, surgery, hormones, or even consistent presentation is required for the identity to be valid. This one contains a genuine A4TE principle. A4TE explicitly says there is no single right way to be transgender and that a transgender person’s identity does not depend upon medical transition, legal changes, or changes in appearance. (Trans Equality) Denial of the identity is a denial of the person. Disagreeing with the identity claim is framed as saying the person “doesn’t exist,” not as disputing a proposition. Nothing resembling this is required. Sex, biology, and language Sex is a spectrum, a social construct, or at least not a strict binary relevant to policy. Chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy are treated as crude, incomplete, or bigoted ways to classify people. None of this appears in A4TE’s allyship requirements. “Assigned sex at birth” is the preferred description of sex, implying a bureaucratic label rather than an observed reproductive category. Not an allyship requirement. Preferred pronouns and names are morally mandatory. Use the name, pronouns, and language a transgender person uses for themselves. Using sex-based pronouns is “misgendering”; using a prior name is “deadnaming.” Both are treated as harms comparable to slurs. This is one of the clearest things that actually survives. A4TE tells allies to follow the person’s lead regarding language, ask politely about pronouns when necessary, and apologize and move on after mistakes. It does not say pronoun mistakes are equivalent to slurs. (Trans Equality) There is no polite way to state the sex distinction. “Biological male/female,” “natal sex,” and similar terms are often classified as hate speech or dogwhistles. Not there. Medical and youth claims Gender dysphoria is validated by affirmation, not primarily explored as a possible misattribution of other distress. “Watchful waiting” or exploratory therapy is frequently labeled conversion therapy. Not part of this allyship standard. Medical transition (blockers, hormones, surgery) is healthcare, and withholding it is violence. Access is framed as lifesaving; gatekeeping is framed as cruelty. Not required. The page acknowledges that some transgender people medically transition and others do not; it does not require these medical propositions. (Trans Equality) Minors can have a stable, knowable transgender identity that justifies social and often medical transition. Parental or clinical caution is cast as abuse or bigotry. Not there. Desistance, detransition, and comorbidity (autism, trauma, same-sex attraction, social contagion) are minimized, treated as rare, or blamed on stigma rather than on the affirmation model. Not there. Social and institutional claims Single-sex spaces, sports, prisons, and shelters must follow identity, not sex. People should be allowed to use bathrooms and other gendered facilities consistent with their gender identity. Exclusion of males who identify as women is discrimination. There is a substantive policy position here, but Grok enormously broadens it. A4TE explicitly advocates restroom access according to gender identity. Its ally page does not establish a universal principle that sports, prisons, shelters, and every other sex-separated institution must therefore operate according to the identical rule. (Trans Equality) Any line among “trans women” is itself bigotry. Distinguishing social-only from medically transitioned, or pre-op from post-op, is “transmedicalism” or “dividing the community.” A4TE does say that medical transition is not a prerequisite for someone’s transgender identity. It does not say every distinction among transgender people is bigotry. (Trans Equality) Lived experience outranks data when studies, crime patterns, or fairness in sport cut against the identity rule. Nothing like this appears. Questions are a form of harm. Asking for definitions (“what is a woman?”), evidence, or tradeoffs is treated as bad-faith or as endangering trans people. In fact, A4TE explicitly distinguishes inappropriate intrusive questions from legitimate ones. Its advice is essentially to ask whether you actually need intimate information and whether you would consider the same question appropriate if directed at yourself. That is a rule of ordinary courtesy, not “questions are harmful.” (Trans Equality) Opposition is explained as animus. The admissible motives are hatred, disgust, or religion; safety, fairness, child protection, and definitional accuracy are discounted. Not there. Political enforcement Allies must affirm publicly. Neutrality (“I don’t care what adults do privately”) is often not enough; failure to repeat the slogans is coded as hostility. A4TE does encourage allies to speak publicly in support of transgender people, challenge anti-trans remarks and jokes, support people experiencing discrimination, and learn about policies affecting transgender people. But it does not impose a requirement to repeat ideological slogans or characterize failure to do so as hostility. Indeed, when discussing political advocacy, it says to help change policies “if you’re comfortable with it.” (Trans Equality) Conflicts with women’s rights and gay rights are denied or inverted. Sex-based rights are reframed as bigotry; same-sex attraction is pressured toward “attraction to gender identity.” Nothing remotely like this appears as a condition of allyship. The category must expand, not contract. Nonbinary, genderfluid, xenogender, and similar identities are folded into the same moral protection as transsexualism; limiting the category is betrayal. A4TE recognizes diversity within the transgender community and directs readers to resources about nonbinary people. It does not articulate Grok’s supposed principle that the category “must expand,” mention xenogenders here, or call limiting the category “betrayal.” (Trans Equality) After running Grok's twenty alleged “load-bearing principles” through an actual mainstream transgender advocacy organization's guide to how to be an ally, I think the result is revealing. What survives is basically: Respect transgender people's identities even if you don't fully understand them. Don't require medical transition or stereotypical appearance before recognizing someone as transgender. Use people's requested names, pronouns, and terminology. Respect their privacy. Oppose discrimination. Speak supportively when appropriate. Support gender-identity-based restroom access and some other inclusive policies. A4TE also encourages allies to educate themselves, avoid invasive questions about surgery or genitalia, protect people's privacy about their transgender status, reconsider unnecessary gender fields on forms, and advocate nondiscrimination protections. (Trans Equality) What emphatically doesn't survive is most of the supposedly “load-bearing ideology”: that sex is a social construct; reproductive biology is bigoted; identity literally is biological sex; disagreement denies somebody's existence; withholding transition is violence; questions are harmful; lived experience outranks data; opponents are motivated by animus; women's and gay rights must be subordinated; xenogender must be affirmed; and so forth. That comparison makes the problem with Grok's original answer unusually clear. It did not identify the minimum principles of trans allyship and then describe them charitably. It assembled maximalist claims, hostile interpretations, disputed policy positions, and accusations about activist behavior, and labeled the resulting package the “load-bearing principles” of trans advocacy. That is almost a textbook example of a strawman.

Let me get this straight. When you say an 18-year-old kid is an “Elder,” it is my job as the listener to figure out which definition you are using and understand what you mean. But if somebody else says, “I am a woman because that is my gender identity,” that’s totally different: you have no corresponding responsibility to understand what they mean. Instead, you can impose your definition onto their words and then criticize them for the nonsense that results. Do I have that right? Because if you aren’t willing even to acknowledge a responsibility to understand another person's conceptual framework before criticizing what they are saying, I’m not sure there is much point in continuing the conversation.

Hi @smac97, After I posted this, I realized it wouldn’t be clear what I was referring to, so I decided to flesh out my point. On a personal level, it irritates me that you went to a source with an obvious political bias on this topic (Grok), asked it to create a straw man version of “trans ideology”, and then use this to bait the people you are talking to and then criticizing them for not embracing the straw man. For my part, I asked ChatGPT to critique what Grok said on this matter, and replace its straw man with a steel man. Here is what GPT says: First, I would not call these the “fundamental tenets of trans ideology.” There is no catechism, governing body, or agreed philosophical system called trans ideology. More importantly, allyship is primarily a position about how transgender people should be treated, not a requirement that one accept a particular metaphysics of sex. If I were trying to steelman the minimum position, I would reduce it to something like this: A minimal trans-ally position Transgender people are describing a real human experience. Some people experience a persistent gender identity that does not correspond to the sex category in which they were born and raised. One need not settle whether this identity is innate, developmental, neurological, psychological, social, or some combination in order to take their experience seriously. Transgender people deserve the same dignity, liberty, and legal protection as everyone else. They should not be harassed, assaulted, fired, denied housing, or otherwise mistreated simply because they are transgender. In ordinary social interactions, people should generally accommodate another person's gender identity. If someone lives and presents socially as a woman, there is usually no reason not to call her a woman, use the name she asks to be called, and use female pronouns. That is ordinary interpersonal courtesy. It does not require believing that chromosomes, reproductive anatomy, or biological history have somehow changed. Sex and gender identity are distinguishable concepts. Biological sex is real. Gender identity and gender expression are also real phenomena. Which one matters depends upon what we are talking about. At a cocktail party, gender identity may be overwhelmingly relevant and chromosomes completely irrelevant. In some medical contexts, biological sex may be critically important. Public-policy questions should be decided individually rather than by slogans. Bathrooms, competitive sports, prisons, shelters, medical records, identification documents, and treatment of minors do not necessarily present the same problem. Being a trans ally does not require believing that gender identity must prevail over sex in every conceivable context. It requires taking the interests of transgender people seriously along with whatever competing interests actually exist. Medical questions are empirical questions. It is entirely consistent with trans allyship to ask about benefits, risks, diagnostic uncertainty, desistance, detransition, comorbidities, age, informed consent, and the quality of evidence supporting particular treatments. Compassion does not require knowing the answer before the research is done. That strikes me as a defensible minimum. Someone could go substantially further—believing, for example, that self-identification should control virtually every legal sex classification—without that stronger proposition becoming a prerequisite for treating transgender people decently. And this is where I think Grok's earlier answer went badly off the rails. Its 20-item list isn't a steelman of trans allyship. It is a hostile reconstruction of the most maximalist things one can associate with trans activism, sprinkled with assertions about activist motives and behavior, and then presented as though those constitute the movement's “fundamental tenets.” Look at what gets smuggled into the supposed creed. A trans ally allegedly must believe that sex is socially constructed; that chromosomes and reproductive anatomy are crude or bigoted classifications; that disagreement denies people's existence; that withholding medical treatment is “violence”; that lived experience outranks data; that asking questions is harmful; that opponents are motivated by animus; that conflicts with women's or gay rights must be denied; and even that xenogender identities must receive exactly the same conceptual treatment as classical transsexualism. Those aren't minimum propositions necessary for trans allyship. Several aren't propositions about transgender identity at all. They are accusations about how certain activists allegedly argue. That distinction matters. For example, compare: Steelman: “It is generally courteous to socially recognize a trans woman as a woman.” with: Strawman: “A person's subjective identity literally overrides biological sex, and anyone who disagrees is denying that person's existence.” Those are not equivalent claims. Or compare: Steelman: “Sex-associated biological traits do not always align perfectly, and scientists can therefore meaningfully discuss variation in sex characteristics.” with: Strawman: “Sex is a social construct and chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy are bigoted ways to classify people.” Again, not remotely the same proposition. And compare: Steelman: “Gender-affirming medical treatment can benefit some patients and should be evaluated using the ordinary standards of evidence-based medicine.” with: Strawman: “Medical transition is lifesaving, withholding it is violence, and clinical caution is cruelty.” A person can believe the first and emphatically reject the second. This is why I think Grok deserved considerably more skepticism than it received here. The giveaway isn't merely that individual statements are debatable. It is the construction of the list itself. Nearly every disputed question is phrased in the version least charitable to the trans side. Moderate propositions are replaced with absolutist ones; empirical controversies become alleged articles of faith; and the worst rhetoric one can find among activists is treated as constitutive of the entire worldview. If I asked an AI for “the fundamental tenets of conservative Christianity” and it returned twenty propositions about controlling women, suppressing gay people, rejecting science, imposing religion through government, and treating dissenters as sinners, nobody would mistake that for neutral analysis merely because examples could be found of Christians saying each of those things. The same standard should apply here. One can disagree profoundly with particular trans activists, reject self-ID as a universal legal rule, believe biological sex remains important, demand better evidence for pediatric medicine, and recognize genuine conflicts involving sports or privacy—and still hold the rather modest proposition at the center of trans allyship: Transgender people are real people describing a real experience, and in both our personal interactions and our laws we should try to treat them with dignity, courtesy, and fairness while dealing honestly with biological reality and legitimate competing interests. That is a considerably stronger steelman than Grok's partisan caricature—and, I think, a much more useful starting point for an actual discussion.

Asking Grok to summarize “the fundamental tenets of trans ideology” is like asking Walter Martin to summarize the fundamental tenets of Mormonism. That comparison isn’t perfect, though, because I don’t think there even is a uniform list of trans ideological doctrines that you must subscribe to in order to be considered an ally. When I have used the word “woman” that way, I was using it as a gender category rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female. If somebody has a female gender identity and female gender expression, the polite thing to do is socially categorize them as a woman. In my view, when you do this you are fervently refusing to understand their words, their conceptual framework, and the nuances of their point. “Gender identity” and “gender expression” are well-defined terms that represent real-world things, too. On my mission, on a few occasions people I was talking to were adamant that I wasn’t an “elder”. In their view, calling a 19-year old kid an “elder” was a radical “departure from empirical reality,” and they were willing to die on that hill. I disagree with you on this one. George Box said all models are wrong, but some are useful. The sexual binary is a model. In many contexts it is an extremely useful one, but when dealing with the biology of real-world people, it is less universally useful than many people imagine, and certainly isn’t the ultimate truth of what it means to be a human being. Empirical reality is that sex is "the biological components, including anatomical and physiological traits, largely related to sexual reproduction. Not all components align for all people." "Sex assigned at birth" means “sex recorded at birth.” It is in fact a term used by doctors in medical records when dealing with these issues, and was well-defined by the Academies. I don’t think it is my job to gate-keep the definition of words and to agree or disagree with definitions. I generally use the definitions the Academy provided, and try to understand what people are trying to communicate with the words they use. My sense is that much of trans advocacy is built less on redefining biological sex than on the idea that how we relate to other people matters. In ordinary social contexts, the polite and humane thing to do is generally to treat people in a way that aligns with their gender identity and presentation. That does not require pretending biological sex is unreal or different than what it really is. It means recognizing that social categories used in social situations don’t necessarily need to line up with the underlying biology you’d talk about with your doctor in medical situations. I'm not in a position to endorse anything on this. I’m a finance expert, not a doctor. I will note that the purpose of this glossary is to understand medical records, not describe the polite way to engage with others in all social interactions. Just because you think something is incoherent doesn't mean it really is. I’d give the benefit of the doubt to doctors and assume they speak coherently about medical and biological issues. If you think they are using the language incoherently, maybe you are the one with an ideology that is a little off. “Not all components align” is biological reality when we’re talking about real-world human beings. When scientists say “sex is a spectrum,” they do not mean that male and female are meaningless categories. They mean that the biological traits associated with sex: chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genital anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and gene expression, do not always line up perfectly and often vary continuously in degree. From this coherent, reality-based point of view, sex is bimodal rather than perfectly binary in every biological feature: most people cluster strongly around typical male or female patterns, while some fall between or outside those typical combinations. This can be an insightful way of understanding human biology. As a thought experiment, imagine in a few years Elder Uchtdorf as prophet. Imagine at the same time a faithful member of the Church who deeply, deeply, feels their spirit is a woman and that somehow, their body looks, biologically, like a male. This person isn’t an activist or public agitator. Just a committed Latter-day Saint who feels like a woman trapped in a males body. They finds themself talking to the first presidency about it, and after a blessing and a prayer they receive a revelation: this person’s spirit really is a female spirt. In principle, this could happen, right? Mormons believe in spirits, and that spirits really do have genders. And they also believe genetic defects generally don’t reflect the essence of the body’s spirit. So what if the prophet had a revelation that a specific biological man had a female spirit? Would you object to this person claiming that on the inside, they really are a woman? Would you insist they be treated like a man, despite the prophet’s revelation that their spirit is female?

I honestly don’t know what you think I’m saying that "are empirically and obviously true, and which [I] nevertheless deny.” I’m squarely on the side of empirical reality. Let’s level set. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is a private, nonprofit, non-governmental scientific institution chartered by Congress to provide independent, objective advice to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine. It is not an advocacy organization. Its consensus reports are prepared by expert committees and undergo independent peer review. Two years ago, they published a “consensus study report” that touches on some things we’ve been discussing. The Statement of Task of this report begins with: "An ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will review the latest published research and medical guidelines addressing the current status of sex-specific medical diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment for individuals who are transgender or who are undergoing gender affirming procedures. Based on the available evidence, the committee’s report will strive to: 1. Describe the current clinical conceptions of sex and gender accepted by the medical community, including: a. How sex and gender are medically defined ..." They offer the following definitions: Sex : The biological components, including anatomical and physiological traits, largely related to sexual reproduction. Not all components align for all people. (Alternatively Biological sex) Gender: A multidimensional construct that links language with social and cultural expectations about status, characteristics, and behavior that are supposedly associated with sex traits. Male: A term identifying individuals who are typically capable of producing sperm for fertilizing ova. Males typically have XY chromosomes. Not everyone who is male has all the traits (e.g., chromosomes, hormone prevalence, external and internal anatomy) that are typically defined as male. (Alternatively Male sex, Man, Boy) Female: A term identifying individuals who typically have ovaries and produce eggs. Females typically have XX chromosomes. Not everyone who is female has all the traits (e.g., chromosomes, hormone prevalence, external and internal anatomy) that are typically defined as female. (Alternatively Female sex, Woman, Girl) Sex recorded at birth: The sex recorded on the original birth certificate (based on appearance of external genitals observed at birth by physical exam). (Alternatively Sex assigned at birth, Sex designated at birth, Birth sex, Assigned female at birth, Assigned male at birth) Sex of rearing: The sex assigned to a child at birth, most often based on the appearance of the child’s external genital anatomy. Traditionally, sex of rearing is assigned as “male” or “female,” although in some geographic regions, there is the option of “X.” Assigned sex of rearing becomes the sex recorded on birth certificates and medical records. When a child is born with atypical genitalia, there may be a delay in assigning sex of rearing until the child’s condition or diagnosis is better understood. Through a shared decision-making process between a multidisciplinary care team and the child’s parents/guardians/caregivers, the goal is to select a sex of rearing that has the greatest likelihood of matching gender identity in adulthood.(Alternatively Sex assignment at birth, Gender of rearing, Assigned sex of rearing, Assigned gender of rearing) Gender marker: Designation of “male” (M) “female” (F) or other (X) on a document, including on the original birth certificate. Depending on the document, this marker may represent an individual’s sex recorded at birth or gender identity and a designation of “X,” where present on records, may be defined in different ways. (Alternatively Sex marker) Gender identity: Used by individuals to label themselves and their internal sense of themselves. One’s gender identity can be the same as or different from one’s sex recorded at birth. (Alternatively Affirmed gender, Gender) Gender expression: One’s mannerisms and appearance—including through behavior, clothing, body characteristics, or voice—that are, in a given culture, associated with masculinity or femininity. Gender attribution: The process through which others assign a gender to a person, with or without knowledge of that person’s sex recorded at birth or gender identity. Do you take issue with these definitions, or do you think this ad hoc committee of the National Academy largely succeeded in conveying how these terms are medically defined?

I think what’s really happening is that since these edge cases were so extremely rare, most people lived their whole lives never having to confront the issue. Now there are a few social influencers trying to get famous by publishing outrageous content, and an entire industry engineered to feed addictive rage in their viewership. That is indisputably going on. The outstanding question is whether the societal order is really breaking down. I’ve been asking for is some evidence that it is, and evidence that laws like that of Kansas will do more good than harm. It’s obvious to me that creating laws that REQUIRE “people who look like men” to use the women’s restroom undermines the very thing it is trying to prevent--uncomfortable confrontations in bathrooms with people who look like they don’t belong there. Rather than being given statistics about the societal order breaking down or even personal anecdotes, I’m just repeatedly told "Lily Tino is a man going into DisneyWorld bathrooms” over and over again. I can understand how somebody might feel that the societal order is breaking down if they are obsessed with videos featuring Lily Tino, Lia Thomas, and drag queens. I never heard of Lily Tino until Smac brought it up here. The reason those videos are shocking is because they are outrageous outliers that are so far afield from what we all see in our normal lives. The shock value is evidence that the societal code is doing fine, not that we are doomed. Maybe that is the biggest difference between Smac and me. Smac thinks the anecdotes of outrageous behavior he curates are impressive evidence. That is why he posts his lists over and over and over. In contrast, I’m a statistician and am not persuaded by anecdotes. Show me statistically significant evidence. Is there any? Or even give me some personal anecdotes. How often do you or the people around you bump into “people who look like men” in women restrooms?

The basic way you continue to misrepresent my position is by claiming I advocate for something new and radical. That just isn’t true. What I'm claiming is that there is zero evidence that the new 2026 law in Kansas was needed. It is incumbent upon you to show why this new law is needed and explain why this law does more good than harm. This is the kind of statement that makes it hard for me to take you seriously. When a child is born, a doctor quickly examines them and makes a call on whether to put an “F” or “M” on the birth certificate. Making that judgement call is what it means to “assign” a sex to somebody. I’m sure you’re aware of this. I don’t understand why you are adamant that it is impossible for a doctor to do what they do every single time they fill out a birth certificate. Furthermore, doctors sometimes get this wrong. Emily Quinn is an example. When he was born, his doctor thought the “observable fact” was that he is female. It turns out the doctor was mistaken--biologically, the baby was male, not female. He is a male who was assigned to the sex “female” at birth. First, note that earlier in this thread, you said that some men should use the women’s restroom. An example you gave is Emily Quinn. Emily Quinn is a man. That is the hard, cold, biological fact of the matter. Yet you are okay with him using the women’s restroom. So we both agree that there are cases when biological men should use the women’s restroom. What we disagree about is the edge cases: where the line should be drawn, and who should make those calls. These edge cases aren’t recent. What actually is recent is culture warriors deciding this is a winning issue and constantly throwing it in your face. The only reason you know who Lily Tino or Lily Thomas are is because the people who curate your news want this to be an issue. Just because Fox News only recently started publicizing this doesn’t mean it’s a new issue.

I’d like to summarize my thoughts on the issues we’ve been discussing. I’ll do so in Q&A format: Q: What is the purpose of public bathrooms? A: To provide a place for people to use the toilet and attend to ordinary sanitary needs while they are out in public. Q: Which restroom should an individual choose when they need to use one? A: The one that will minimize discomfort to themselves and to the people around them. Q: Do we need a law that mandates which restroom people must use? A: No. Society got along fine without such laws, and there is nothing happening now that demonstrates such a law is necessary, much less that it would do more good than harm. Q: Do we need a “limiting principle” governing which bathroom people may use? A: Yes. The limiting principle is that people should use the restroom that will minimize discomfort to themselves and to those around them. Q: But isn’t that functionally identical to giving people a license to use any restroom for any reason they want, or for no reason whatsoever? A: No. The ordinary purpose of a bathroom is to walk in, use the toilet, flush, wash your hands, and leave. If somebody is using a bathroom for some other purpose--harassment, loitering, intimidation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, solicitation, etc.--those acts can be, should be, and, where appropriate, already are illegal. The crime isn’t using the “wrong” restroom. The crime is the underlying conduct. Q: Who gets to decide which bathroom will minimize discomfort to themselves and to those around them? A: The person who needs to use the bathroom. Q: But if we treat people like adults living in a free society and allow them to choose which restroom is most appropriate, won’t that lead to the eradication of sex-distinct restrooms? A: No. Q: Do you have any evidence that it won’t? A: Yes. The evidence on this point is overwhelming. As an institution, sex-distinct restrooms in free societies have thrived for generations without laws assigning every person to a restroom according to biological sex. If allowing people to decide which toilet is most appropriate somehow caused the eradication of sex-distinct restrooms, they would have been eradicated long ago. If, despite that long and exceptionally clear history, 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. Q: But somebody looking like a woman and feeling like a woman doesn’t override the underlying biology! The women’s restroom is for biological females and the men’s restroom is for biological males! It’s always been that way! A: That is manifestly false as a description of how public restrooms have actually operated. Public restrooms have never had gatekeepers examining chromosomes, gonads, reproductive anatomy, or developmental reproductive pathways before admitting people. In ordinary life, the social convention has overwhelmingly operated through appearance and ordinary social recognition. That is why most strangers would think nothing unusual about seeing biological males such as Valentina Sampaio, Carmen Carrera, Kim Petras, or Geena Rocero enter a women’s restroom, while biological females such as Aydian Dowling, Laith Ashley, Buck Angel, or Schuyler Bailar entering that same restroom would be far more likely to cause confusion or alarm. Q: But those are extreme cases: exceptionally feminine-looking biological males and exceptionally masculine-looking biological females! A: Exactly. They prove the point. Whatever abstract theory someone may now construct about the historical purpose of sex-distinct bathrooms, the system has never functioned by inspecting underlying reproductive biology. In practice, it has functioned through ordinary social perception. Q: But what about cases where people suspect, or even know, that someone choosing the women’s restroom is biologically male? A: First, such cases are rare. The social pressure against entering a restroom where you obviously are not wanted is enormous. Second, someone whose presence appears conspicuously out of place will already attract intense scrutiny. If an obviously male-presenting stranger walks down a hallway, nobody thinks much of it. If he walks into the women’s restroom, people immediately go on high alert. That makes the women’s restroom an extraordinarily poor place for a would-be criminal to operate unnoticed. If somebody behaves suspiciously, take whatever reasonable precautions are appropriate. But if somebody walks in, uses the toilet, washes their hands, and leaves, mind your own business. A public restroom is not a sanctuary in which you are guaranteed never to encounter anyone who makes you uncomfortable or whom you disapprove of. It is a place containing toilets. Go in, deal with the offensive sights, sounds, and smells that inevitably accompany public bathrooms, take care of your business, and get out. Q: But what about locker rooms! And sports! And prisons! And drag shows! A: Those are separate issues. If we want to analyze them rationally, we should treat them as separate issues. Whether there was an inappropriate children’s reading event in Houston in 2019 tells us precisely nothing about whether Kansas needed a bathroom law in 2026. If somebody insists on repeatedly conflating bathrooms, locker rooms, competitive athletics, prisons, drag shows, children’s events, and every other transgender-related controversy into one giant undifferentiated problem, I can’t help but wonder whether the common denominator they are actually objecting to is not any particular policy at all, but transgender people themselves.

The last time you said this about me, I corrected you and explained that is the opposite of my position. Clearly, you aren't interested in understanding my point of view. I'm out.

In this case it does. There wouldn't be an issue if the guys on your side didn't fabricate it. The WNBA was working fine on this, 100% of the time, for 30 years and counting. Buildings generally have a ton of stored chemical energy and exist in an oxygen rich environment. The energy of massive fires is always there. They need some activation energy to start burning and once they start, entire cities can burn down. We know all of this both from basic chemistry and from historical experience. The purpose of fire codes is to prevent this runaway process from happening. You seem to think that like a wooden house full of chemical energy that "wants" to burn, the world is brimming with cis-gender men who really, really, want to participate in women's sports. You seem to think that because of this overwhelming desire men have of going into the lady's room, we need heavy-handed laws with extremely sharp lines that are based on biological sex to keep them out. You seem to think there are so many guys who want to do this that they'd completely take over women sports if given half the chance. I'll refrain from speculating about why you think there are so many guys out there that want to play women's sports and hang out in women's locker rooms. However, the truth is there are very few transgender people. Of those, very few are interested in sports. Of those, very few are good enough or strong enough to make a difference in terms of competitiveness or safety. It's a tiny, marginal issue that rarely affects anybody. Not really. The default should be living in a free society with a minimum number of rules. Only create laws when doing so is absolutely necessary. That is a general principle. Nobody is arguing that girl's bathrooms should be wide open to anybody who says the right magic word before entering. That is a strawman. Even you concede that some biological males (e.g. Emily Quinn) may use the lady's room. The question is whether we need the government to create heavy-handed laws with bright, inflexible lines about who may and may not go into this or that bathroom. It's clear that giant swath of Fox's viewers want to be very, very upset about men entering women spaces. It's also clear that not enough men do that in order to keep the topic in the headlines. Thus, they are dispatching their own people into women's spaces and putting the resulting "controversy" on the front page.

A huge part of the problem is that that the "substance" is largely built on speculations, slippery slopes, strawmen, outlier anecdotes, and amplified hypotheticals. It doesn't address whether the proposed solutions (e.g. the Kansas bathroom law) cause more good or harm in the real world. I would suggest in general, as a society we should allow people the freedom to live their own lives: treat others the way you'd like to be treated, give people different than you some grace, recognize we live in a pluralistic society, and try to get along. If you think new laws are necessary (e.g. requiring all biological females to use the female restroom), it is incumbent upon you to explain why the cost of that law is worth it and explain why such a law would do more good than harm. The example you brought up to kick off this thread is the WNBA. If there were big scarry men who really wanted to play in the WNBA, and somehow the system was forcing the league to admit them as players, then that would be interesting news. But that has never happened. Not once. But apparently some activists got tired of waiting for this hypothetical to occur naturally and decided to manufacture the test case themselves. Today (August 24) if you go to FoxNews.com, top stories include: The lead story on the entire homepage: Enes Kanter Freedom discussing his confrontation at a WNBA game and his campaign to enter the WNBA. One of Fox’s four “Hot Topics”: “WNBA CONTROVERSY,” second only to the war with Iran. Another prominent story: “Fever coach urges press don’t ‘give it any gas’ as transgender firestorm rages.” The OutKick section promotes that story again, plus another about the Sky coach defending Natasha Cloud after her argument with Freedom. Notice what is missing: an actual transgender WNBA player (there have been ZERO in history). An actual displaced female player. An actual injury caused by the policy. None of the harm the controversy is supposedly about has actually occurred. It's a manufactured controversy built to push your buttons. And this is the specific story that you used to steer the discussion in this direction.

This topic?

In order to be responsive to your point, I did some more research on Lilly Tino. I'd never heard of her until you repeatedly brought her up as a source of daily discussion, debate, and news here. Here is the big question: is "my side" somehow trying to leverage her content to make trans issues "a source for daily discussion and debate and news"? I just can't imagine that you were minding your own business and she suddenly showed up on your Tik Tok feed, much less that the New York Times or Huffington Post brought her to your attention. Lilly is clearly trying to be an provocative influencer, but by herself she is only reaching a few hundred thousand people. In absolute numbers that is impressive, but it's a tiny percentage of the population. So why are we talking about her here? To research this, I made a list of the top 10 right-wing news/editorial sites, and the top 10 mainstream/liberal sites, and then, with the help of AI, searched all 20 for content on Lilly. Here is what I found: BOTTOM LINE: Among 20 major news organizations I searched, right-leaning outlets produced at least 13 substantive Lilly Tino stories/segments. Mainstream/center-left outlets produced 1. For the 2025 Disney controversy specifically, the score was 10–0. I searched the same ten large right-leaning outlets and ten large mainstream/center-left outlets for both “Lilly Tino” and “Lilly Contino,” counting only pieces substantially about her. On the right, I found coverage from Fox News, New York Post, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Townhall, RedState, Daily Wire and PJ Media. Breitbart and RedState covered her repeatedly. On the other side, I found nothing from the New York Times, CNN, Guardian, USA Today, NBC, Reuters, AP, Washington Post or NPR. CBS had one 2023 story—about Tino being the victim of anti-trans harassment. This doesn't mean Tino herself isn't seeking attention. She obviously is. Some of her TikToks have received tens of millions of views. But that's different from secondary amplification: Who finds this transgender TikToker, decides her behavior is socially important, and puts it in front of millions of people who don't follow her? On that question, the evidence is overwhelmingly one-sided. The major mainstream/left outlets largely ignore Lilly Tino. Conservative media repeatedly tells its audience about her. So using Lilly Tino as evidence that “liberals are shoving transgender issues in our faces” seems almost exactly backwards. The people working hardest to make Lilly Tino part of the broader political conversation are her critics on the right.

Part 2 of 2 I was wondering if "my side" is "moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news," I decided to go to FoxNews.com and see what issues they were talking about there, and compare it to what is in the New York Times. Fox News had multiple top stories about trans issues, and I couldn't find any in the New York Times about them. I decided to enlist AI to help me conduct my research. ChatGPT could easily access FoxNews.com, but couldn't access NYTimes.com. So, I printed off the launching pages of 4 sections of the Times (Headlines, Sports, Lifestyle, and Editorials), and uploaded it to GPT, and asked it to compare what is in the New York Times to what is in Fox News. Here is what it found out: On August 22, I took a simple snapshot of what two major news organizations were actually putting before their readers. For The New York Times, I looked not merely at its homepage but at four separate pages: the main news page, The Athletic, Lifestyle and Opinion. After eliminating duplicate appearances of the same article, those pages contained 281 unique stories. Not one was about transgender issues. The Times certainly publishes stories about transgender people and policy when it considers them newsworthy. But on this particular day, across hundreds of opportunities—including sports and opinion—it wasn't pushing the subject at all. Fox News was quite different. Its homepage contained 145 unique articles, of which six—4.1%—were substantially about transgender issues. They included transgender athletes, the WNBA, “XX-XY” messaging, a teacher disciplined over a chromosome T-shirt, and a family involved in a dispute over a transgender teacher. Fox also placed “WNBA CONTROVERSY” in its “Hot Topics” banner at the top of the homepage, giving the subject prominence beyond the individual articles. This doesn't prove that liberals never emphasize transgender issues, nor can one day's webpages establish what every person on either “side” does. But it is difficult to square this evidence with Smac's assertion that my side “is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news.” On this day, the supposedly trans-obsessed New York Times offered zero transgender stories among 281 choices. Fox News offered six among 145, while separately promoting the controversy as a Hot Topic. If the question is who was working harder to keep transgender controversies in the daily news cycle, the evidence from this snapshot isn't ambiguous. It was Fox News.

Part 1 of 2 Let’s do a deep dive onto this with a case study: the specific events that led to this thread being resurrected, which is you raising the issue of transgender women competing in the WNBA. As background, the WNBA started in 1997, and has had about 1,300 players between its first game and now. Of those players, one has been transgender: The transgender player was Layshia Clarendon, who played in the league from 2013 to 2024. Layshia’s original birth certificate says “female”, and she is 5’9” tall, 158 pounds. In 2020 she said she now self-identifies as “non-binary” and had chest masculinization surgery. Other than that, zero transgender athletes have played. The Collective Bargaining Agreement with the player’s union says “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” and it assumes that the definition of “woman” is self-explanatory and doesn’t need a special definition. With regard to transgender athletes playing in the WNBA this was a non-issue as it had been for 30 years. If, hypothetically, a transgender athlete said she wanted to play, at that point the league and players union could work out how to apply their CBA to that situation. But until that were to happen, this would be purely hypothetical. Then on August 7, 2026, Fox News released a Fox Exclusive news story: two hard-core MAGA Republican ex-NBA basketball players were going to try and get into the WNBA. They were in fact on “your side”—they are card-carrying Republicans, speakers at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), frequent guests on Fox News, attending Charlie Kirk’s victory party for Trump’s 2025 inaguration, etc. One was a Republican U.S. Senate candidate. Objectively, this is a cheap publicity stunt and a non-event. So why are we talking about it? I did some digging, and the story made the New York Times. The Times didn’t think it deserved a fully story, but it did describe it in three sentences in an editorial about some bigger issues in the WNBA. Here is the totality of what the Times has published about it, quoted in its entirety: New York Times “Now we have ex-NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White mockingly declaring their eligibility for the WNBA Draft. These far-right flamethrowers, these retirees thirsty for attention, these unserious stunt artists are here only to condemn the theory of inclusivity and taunt the women of this league. Please, let me off this ride.” Again, those three sentences are everything the New York Times has said about this. I then tried the same thing at FoxNews.com. There were hundreds of hits about this story. I enlisted ChatGPT to summarize them. Here is what it came up with: Fox News Fox News didn’t simply report the Royce White/Enes Kanter Freedom WNBA stunt once and move on. It repeatedly promoted and repackaged it for nearly two weeks. I can document at least 22 distinct Fox treatments between August 7 and August 19—including news articles, opinion/analysis pieces, Fox TV segments, video clips, interviews, and full-show discussions. That’s a conservative count because I excluded later WNBA stories that merely mentioned White/Freedom or embedded earlier coverage. Fox covered the initial declarations, the WNBA’s response, supposed “loopholes” in league policy, White’s formal draft submission, Matt Gaetz’s involvement, and repeated interviews and discussions on Fox & Friends Weekend, Outnumbered, Fox News @ Night, Fox News Sunday, and OutKick programming. Fox also kept cross-promoting the controversy through related-story links and embedded White/Freedom videos. As of August 22, “WNBA CONTROVERSY” was still one of only four “Hot Topics” promoted at the top of FoxNews.com. So this wasn’t a story Fox reluctantly covered because transgender athletes were dominating the news. Two conservative former NBA players deliberately created a publicity stunt about a hypothetical issue, and Fox turned it into an ongoing news cycle—at least 22 separate treatments in roughly twelve days. Summary Using the New York Times as a proxy for “my side”, this is a total non-issue. Using Fox News as a proxy for “your side”, this is a huge issue where Fox is going out of there way to create multiple stories about it every day and is creating links across the site saying this is a hot issue that its readers and viewers need to be thinking about all the time. After Fox News convinced its readership that this was an important topic for daily discussion and debate and news, you raised the topic here to discuss and debate it here. So given how it is you personally and right-wing news sources who are pretending this total non-issue is a HUGE news event that deserves intense coverage and debate, it is very much mind-blowing that you somehow think “it is very much your side of the debate that is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news.”

I had to go back and review what the topic of this thread actually is. You resurrected this thread a couple of weeks ago because a couple of conservative men decided they wanted to draw attention to a WNBA policy they don't like. The controversy is entirely hypothetical at this point: there is no identified transgender player currently seeking to enter the WNBA. Rather than let this non-issue lie, these conservatives announced that they were going to make an issue of it. And rather than ignore their stunt, you decided to resurrect this topic. I'm reminding you of the context because you said, “I think it is very much your side of the debate that is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news.” This thread—and the news event that precipitated it—is a small example of the larger pattern. It is your side that keeps insisting that these issues become subjects of daily political discussion. I certainly don't claim that Grok's analysis of the issues I raised was perfect, nor that my prompts were. And more fundamentally, I have no idea whether you'd consider a lengthy response to all of that on-topic or another distraction. But I will reiterate my main point: if you are genuinely worried about children being sexualized and groomed, you might want to pay considerably more attention to your own house before worrying about whether some parent somewhere takes their child to a library event you don't approve of.

...says the man who is obsessed with starting threads on these topics. For my part, I'd be oblivious to these issues if it weren't for you. I've been trying to better understand your perspective and to challenge my own biases and to that end, I've licensed Grok as a thinking tool that doesn't share my biases. As an example, I asked the following question to both Grok and GPT: Q: Which side of the debate is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news? Grok: The gender-identity side. They drove the institutional and media push that turned a once-low-visibility issue into constant public controversy. GPT: In current U.S. politics, the political right—especially Republican politicians and conservative media—has done far more to keep transgender issues in the daily political and news agenda, through legislation, campaigns, litigation, and sustained media attention. The left is often responding to those initiatives, though progressive activists and institutions also contribute to keeping the subject visible. There is clearly a bias somewhere. As I've thought about this, here are some of the prompts I gave to Grok and the responses I received. Q: Is the 2026 Kansas bathroom law a good law? Treat this as an adversarial evidence review. Don't infer the answer from progressive or conservative conventional wisdom. Separate empirical facts from value judgments. Identify the strongest evidence against the conclusion you initially favor. Prefer primary sources, quantify things where possible, and tell me explicitly where the evidence doesn't support a confident conclusion. Grok: The 2026 law’s empirical case is weak: Kansas had no documented rise in restroom assaults or voyeurism that it addressed, and post-enactment data show almost no prosecutions. Its strongest justification is definitional—it restores a verifiable sex-based rule after institutions began treating self-ID as official—rather than a response to measured local harm. The main costs (edge-case mismatches such as masculine-presenting females in women’s rooms, plus reported avoidance of public facilities) are real but unquantified. Evidence does not support a confident claim that the law either prevented a breakdown or improved net safety in Kansas. Q: Have the law's supporters really thought it through? They *say* they want female privacy from biological males, but perhaps what they really want is to not have to go into the restroom with people who *look* like they don't belong there. Grok: Many have not fully. The law uses birth sex, so it sends masculine-looking biological females into women’s rooms and feminine-looking biological males into men’s rooms—the opposite of “people who look like they belong.” That mismatch suggests the real driver for a lot of supporters is visual and social discomfort, not a consistently applied biological principle. The following questions are intended to put into perspective accusations of sexualizing and grooming children Q: If a Mormon leader--be it a bishop, teacher, scoutmaster, or anybody else who has the trust of members through his affiliation with the church--hurts a child, what are the chances that it will reach the news outside the church? Grok: Low. Independent trackers have compiled hundreds of cases in which LDS bishops or similar leaders allegedly abused children or failed to report it, yet most never become secular news; they typically surface only years later through lawsuits, court records, or investigations such as the AP’s, not through church disclosure. Q: What are the chances that a bishop will "sexualize" children in worthiness interviews by asking him or her questions about their sexual activities at an inappropriately young age? Grok: High. Thousands of documented accounts describe bishops asking 11- and 12-year-olds explicit questions about masturbation, touching, and sexual acts in one-on-one interviews; the church later advised against probing but implementation still varies widely by untrained lay bishop. Q: What are the chances that the bishop sexualizing children in interviews will make the news? Grok: Low for any single interview, which stays private; the broader practice reached national news only after a 2018 campaign collected thousands of stories and prompted church policy changes. Q: If some sort of drag queen story time at a library or whatever does something that is inappropriate and sexualizes children, what are the chances that this event will make the news? Grok: High. Public library events are filmed and promoted, so documented cases of sexualized performances or convicted sex offenders reading to children have repeatedly gone viral and drawn national coverage. Q: In terms of both the frequency and severity of harm to a child, which is more dangerous--exposing a child to storytime by a drag queen at a library, or exposing a child to Mormon church leaders in worthiness interviews and other church settings? Grok: The Mormon interviews and related church settings are more dangerous. They are systematic and repeated for millions of children in private with an authority figure who can impose religious penalties, producing thousands of documented accounts of explicit sexual questioning plus hundreds of abuse or failure-to-report cases; drag story times are optional public group events whose isolated problems, while real, reach far fewer children and lack the same power imbalance or secrecy.

I said nothing about “the management of the City of Minneapolis.” I said they’ve explicitly given transgender people the freedom to use the restrooms of their choice over 50 years ago. This proves 3 things: 1- Your belief that transgender people using the bathroom will cause the downfall of civilization is false. 2- This is an issue that existed decades before you got upset about it. 3- You tipped your hand—you are taking cues from the Right Wing Grievance Industrial Complex—the management of Minneapolis is a made-up non-issue that has nothing to do with this conversation, other than being another made-up target of the Right Wing Grievance Industrial Complex. None of these things means there is anything new or wrong or dangerous about letting people choose their own toilets without interference from the heavy hand of government.

We have had identity-based access as the norm, either implicitly (Kansas 1861-2025) or explicitly (Minneapolis 1975 - now). The reason you only started noticing recently is because the right-wing grievance industria complex has only recently started to tell you this is what you should worry about. It isn’t driven by a real-world issue. It is driven by psychological manipulation.

There is no evidence that the laissez fair stopped working and that sex-segregated bathrooms would be in peril without new draconian laws. Conservatives being afraid of diversity isn't new. You remind me of Archie Bunker singing, "....and you knew who you were then! Girls were girls and men were men! Mr. we could could use a man Like Herbert Hoover again Didn't need no welfare state Everybody pulled his weight! Gee, our old LaSalle ran great! Those were the days!" The city of Minneapolis has explicitly let transgender people use the restroom of their choice since 1975. And guess what. After 51 years, sex-distinct restrooms there are still the norm and are still as safe as anywhere. Transgender people existing and using their own judgement on which restroom to use isn't a new phenomenon--they've lived in Kansas for decades and decades, and have been minding their own business and using the restrooms they thought were most appropriate. What's changed isn't that they started using the restrooms that matched their identity. What changed is the fact that the conservative grievance-industrial complex decided this was a winning issue.