Analytics

Prompt: On this page, Smac97 has summarized several beliefs he claims that I hold which he finds, to different levels, "absurd." Please review what I have said in this thread and the other related ones, and from that determine what my beliefs actually are. Without evaluating the alleged absurdity of these alleged beliefs, is he representing my beliefs accurately? ChatGPT-6 Luna Max The relevant posts contain direct corrections of Smac97’s claims, Analytics’s qualification of what he believes about God, and a detailed explanation of his restroom policy. www.mormondialogue.org Smac97’s portrayal of Analytics’s views is partly accurate in broad outline, but several of his specific claims overstate or misstate what Analytics has said. Analytics argues that evidence and reason favor naturalism, and he expresses very high confidence that the specific God and supernatural claims of Mormonism are false. But he has also said that he does not claim to know that no conceivable deity exists, and he distinguishes “implausible” from “impossible.” So the claim that Analytics says science has proved that God does not exist is too broad. The claim that Analytics believes a man becomes a woman simply by identifying as one is directly contradicted by his posts. He distinguishes biological sex from social or legal uses of terms such as “woman,” and he supports ordinary public restroom use consistent with a person’s sincere gender identity. It is also inaccurate to say Analytics has offered no limits on restroom access. He describes a policy for ordinary public restrooms, with intervention based on conduct such as harassment, voyeurism, or threats; he does not propose the same rule for locker rooms, sports, or prisons. At the same time, he acknowledges that his policy would not reserve women’s restrooms exclusively for people who are biologically female. That is a fair description of a real disagreement with Smac97’s stricter definition of sex-segregated access, but it is not the same as saying there are no limits at all or that the rooms cease to be designated for women and men. Analytics has strongly criticized the LDS Law of Chastity, describing it as culturally inherited and harmful. But he explicitly denies that he considers the LDS sexual ethic uniquely objectionable. Smac97’s account is accurate that Analytics objects to aspects of that ethic; the claim of unique objectionability is not. Finally, Analytics acknowledges that people, including himself, have cognitive biases. He does not claim to have transcended them. It is fair to say that he believes his reasoning favors naturalism and that cultural influences affect religious belief; it would not be fair to portray him as claiming complete impartiality. In sum, Smac97 captures some of Analytics’s broad positions, especially his naturalistic conclusions and his support for restroom access based on sincere gender identity. But several of the specific formulations—particularly that science has disproved every possible God, that Analytics believes identity changes biological sex, that he has no restroom limits, or that he calls the LDS sexual ethic uniquely objectionable—do not accurately represent what Analytics has said. I have no idea what "trans ideology" is. My position is based on basic empathy, a libertarian view of government, and a belief that people are of good will. If somebody says they'd prefer to use a certain set of pronouns, I'll try to grant them the courtesy of using those pronouns. I think the purpose of restrooms is to pee, that people should use the restroom that would make them and others feel less uncomfortable, and that the decision about which restroom will best accomplish that is best left up to individuals--no need for the government to be involved. I think sports leagues should have discretion on who should be allowed to participate, and that safety and fairness are valid concerns they should take into consideration. I think those decisions are best made by leagues and not the government. That's pretty-much it. Empathy. Libertarian view of government. People are of good will. I've repeated my position over and over and over again. You don't need to agree with me, but since you are so interested in talking about this one would think you'd at least acknowledge what other people say.

It isn't that I have successfully transcended my cognitive biases and you have not. I haven't transcended cognitive biases. That isn't my claim. My claim is that I am at least trying. I read books like Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, and The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef. The core messages of those books are the polar opposite of how Mormonism teaches to gain a testimony through faith-based "experiments" (e.g. Alma 32, Moroni 10), praying, listening to testimonies, faith-promoting stories, daily scripture study, etc. One set of methods is based on trying to see the evidence clearly. One set of methods is based on trying to be successful at getting and strengthening your testimony. Two different goals. Two different methods. You have to choose one or the other. Sean Carroll talks about this in detail, of course. Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we don't know some things. There just isn't going to be a journal in Nature that says, "New Discovery! The Heliocentric Model of the Solar System is Disproven! The Earth Really IS the Center of the Universe!" And just because something seems not only plausible but actually intuitive doesn't mean it's plausible at all. That said, I did have a fairly extended conversation with ChatGPT about all of this, and it did agree with you that saying something is "impossible" is materially different than merely saying it is "implausible," and it also agreed with you that I've been relatively sloppy about how I've articulated the confidence in my beliefs, and that the Pinker quote I gave above doesn't rescue me as much as I wanted it to, because these are my central claims. So here is a carefully worded statement of where I'm actually at: I lack belief in “God” in the broad, undefined sense. I don’t claim to know that no conceivable deity exists; without a clearer definition, there isn’t one precise claim for me to affirm or deny. The Mormon God is much more specific: an embodied Heavenly Father, literal father of human spirits, who created and governs the world, intervenes in human lives, and—according to Mormon teaching—has established strict rules about what consenting adults do in private, with severe spiritual consequences for violating them. Given what we know about evolution, the brain, physics, and the history of LDS teachings, I regard that God and the central claims built around Him as extraordinarily implausible. I have very high, though not absolute, confidence that this God does not exist and that Mormonism’s central supernatural claims are false. I can’t assign an exact probability, but I regard it as less likely than Mary Swanson living happily ever after with Lloyd Christmas. For other conceptions of God, I’d need a clear definition before I could assess whether I believe they exist. I then asked GPT-6 Luna Max the following prompt: Given what we know about the core theory, cognitive neuroscience, earth history, biology, evolution, cognitive biases, and how the teachings of the Church have evolved over time, how reasonable is my position? Am I giving too much credence to the shifting winds of science? Am I being too cocky in my assessment of the facts? Am I employing cognitive biases to rationalize what I want to believe? Evaluate the truthfulness of this statement based on the actual strength of the scientific evidence it references. Don't tell me what I want to hear, and don't be vaguely diplomatic to humans and their various contradictory belief systems that they hold dearly to. Tell me the truth. Does this statement capture the actual truth that an unbiased evaluation of the actual evidence would lead us to? It responded:

Not exactly. This reminds me of what Richard Dawkins said: Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion (pp. 366-367). (Function). Kindle Edition.

[emphasis added] I appreciate you using the word "then" to describe the beliefs that these pioneers. It acknowledges that they lived and died before we knew much, if anything, about earth science, biology, evolution, cognitive neuroscience, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and special and general relativity. To clarify my position, when I say rationality leads to naturalism, I'm talking about the findings of modern science more than a mere choice of philosophy. Sean Carroll explains that science isn't based on methodological naturalism, it is based on methodological empiricism. Naturalism as a belief structure is the result of looking at the evidence that we now have. Scientists believe it because that is where the evidence points. I think true humility is recognizing that the religion we were taught from the cradle might be wrong and that just maybe, we are no more special than all of the other people throughout time who have been duped by false religions. I think true humility is looking at what the scientific evidence actually implies and giving it the weight that the supporting evidence indicates. Sticking your head in the sand to protect your religious beliefs isn't humility. It's willful ignorance. My favorite scientist is Steven Pinker. In addition to being a National Academies of Science member for his work as a psychologist, linguist, and cognitive scientist, and in addition to being the usage editor of the American Heritage Dictionary for 11 years, he has written over a dozen amazing books on a wide range of topics. He is an incredible communicator who applies his insights from psychology and linguistics to write understandable and memorable prose. And one of my favorite books he's written is a book on how to write well. It is a style guide called The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. One of the things he advocates in that book is to avoid unnecessary hedging. In my attempt to do that, I may have said things like, "science has proven that the earth is round" instead of saying what is technically more correct like, "while science isn't in the business of proving anything, an overwhelming amount of evidence points to it being round. But as a matter of principle, science remains open to new evidence and new interpretations of the existing evidence that could indicate it is flat." Here is what Pinker said in his own words: Writers acquire the hedge habit to conform to the bureaucratic imperative that’s abbreviated as CYA, which I’ll spell out as Cover Your Anatomy. They hope it will get them off the hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. It’s the same reason that lawsuit-wary journalists drizzle the words allegedly and reportedly throughout their copy, as in The alleged victim was found lying in a pool of blood with a knife in his back. There is an alternative slogan to Cover Your Anatomy: So Sue Me. A classic writer counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means “in general” or “all else being equal.” If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there twenty-four hours a day seven days a week just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. As Thomas and Turner explain, “Accuracy becomes pedantry if it is indulged for its own sake. A classic writer will phrase a subordinate point precisely but without the promise that it is technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged on these points because they are mere scaffolding.” Any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway. Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (pp. 62-63). (Function). Kindle Edition. Your rants here make it clear that you aren't trying to understand my points, much less understand the science I'm talking about. I do think you're doing a good job of giving yourself an excuse to avoid looking at the evidence that could shake your religious convictions, and your response is a good example of motivated reasoning.

I have repeatedly said what my limiting principles were. I have never said that. Sigh. That depends upon how "God" is defined. The Mormon God--i.e. the father of Adam, the flesh-and-bone humanoid space traveler from a planet near Kolob, just isn't plausible. It contradicts everything we know about quantum mechanics, relativity, earth history, and biology. You can mock me for acknowledging this. But you are the one that asked me to comment on your testimony. What I find objectionable is your obsession with the sex lives of others. But "uniquely objectionable"? No. I never said, implied, or thought that.

I think it is important to some people and isn't important to other people. Sure. Yes, you have the right to articulate this. What do you think of Proposition 5a? Proposition 5a: Non-Latter-day Saints are entitled to articulate their thoughts about the X/Y differentiation that Latter-day Saints articulate. This gets to the heart of our differences in world view. You see people as Platonic "kinds." I see them as individuals. You assign people to classes (i.e. kinds), and then give them different rules based upon what class they are in. The classes aren't about whether they can have kids in the real world. They are about whether they can have kids in Plato's realm of the forms. That is why couples A and B, who are identically situated in every real-world way, are treated differently. This clarifies that for you, it isn't really about real-world children. It's about the dogma associated with your idealized thoughts of how the world should be. Logically, the only reasoning I see here is just begging the question. It is unethical for same-sex couples to have sex because it is unethical for same-sex couples to have sex. That is what it comes down to. In Plato's realm of the forms, sure. In the real world, if they are infertile then they don't belong to a generative kind. That is what it means to be non-fertile. I think George Michael was generally correct when he said: Sex is natural, sex is good Not everybody does it But everybody should This is supported by research. The flagship journal of the World Health Organization published a meta-analysis on the effects that sex has on wellbeing. Quoting its findings: "Of 23,930 unique titles identified, 63 studies met the inclusion criteria. We grouped the results into two categories: (i) sexual and physical health; and (ii) sexual and psychological health. The results consistently showed strong correlations between sexual health, overall health and well-being. Almost all studies found significant associations between positive sexual health indicators and lower depression and anxiety, higher quality of life, and greater life satisfaction among men and women, including older adults, pregnant women, and same-sex and mixed-sex couples. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11601183/ I find your sex code to be harmful because it uses false religious beliefs to deprive people of these benefits. When people in your out group follow your code, they can expect lower sexual health, lower overall health, lower overall wellbeing, higher depression and anxiety, lower quality of life, and lower life satisfaction. Your sex code hurts people. That is why I am against it.

My thoughts exactly.

You make a fair point that I really had two points wrapped together. One point was that rationality leads to naturalism. The other point was that cognitive biases are the basis for your underlying beliefs. But stating that those two things are my beliefs aren't logical arguments. I wasn't attempting to prove anything. I was simply telling you what I believe. Here's the thing. Your response to Carroll simply shows you don't understand the strength and scope of his arguments. He isn't merely talking about things as crude as spoon-bending. He's talking about things as subtle as making the slightest nudge to an electron that could even slightly change the probability of a neuron firing. Your efforts to discredit these results are great examples of the motivated reasoning I've been talking about. If you study cognitive neuroscience, you come to exactly the same results, with its independent very high level of confidence, from a totally different basket of evidence. They've done a ton of research on split-brain patients that make the idea of a "ghost in the machine" implausible. Neither of these things disprove the existence of "God", in a broad, intentionally ill-defined kind of way. But the Core Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience do lead to exactly the same result: the idea of some sort of "spirit" that drives our bodies just isn't plausible. It reminds me of the theory of evolution. Darwin recognized that for evolution to be true, the earth had to be really, really (i.e. billions) of years old. But the problem was, nobody thought at the time that there was any way the sun could contain enough energy to burn for that long; they thought it could have energy to burn for a few tens of millions of years old, max. But then we learned about nuclear fusion, and this was suddenly plausible. Then we looked deeply and geology, and it turns out there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is in fact 4.whatever billion years old. Now, you could say that none of this proves that Jesus was wrong when he told Joseph Smith the temporal age of the earth is only 7,000 years (D&C 77:6). Or you could say that "temporal age" means something esoteric or "7,000 years" means something symbolic, or whatever else you want to do in order to salvage D&C 77. But all this would be motivated reasoning. The strength of my position is how so many independent branches of science are so well connected now. They all paint the same picture. They all support each other. And the resulting picture is a universe where the tenets of classic Mormon dogma just aren't plausible. We keep on getting further light and knowledge. And it keeps pointing in the same direction, reinforcing this viewpoint. Let me know if you'd like a list of books to read. Anyway, you specifically laid out "Proposition 1" in a few short paragraphs. You believe in God. You believe in Jesus. You believe in prophets and revelation and so forth. And you specifically asked me to respond to this. Telling you what I believe with the same frankness that you told me what you believe isn't some sort of logical fallacy. It is responding to the question you asked. It's been a long time now, but how many people remember a bygone poster who was hyper-focused on talking and talking and talking about how sinful he thought homosexuality was, and how convinced he was that he could logically prove homosexual sex was morally wrong? If you remember who I'm talking about, you'll also remember that he loved listing logical fallacies. Regardless of what you said, he'd throw a laundry list of logical fallacies back at you. It came across as a mental defense mechanism to avoid engaging with others' opinions. Has anybody heard from Wade Englund lately? How's he doing?

I know this is what you believe. What I'm looking for is the reason why you believe this. You said "I can articulate a reasoned basis for my position," right? What's the reasoned position? You've explained where you draw the line. But you haven't explained why you draw it there. According to you, out of the universe of real-world (legally) married couples who cannot have kids, some may ethically have sex and others may not. You do this by splitting couples who cannot have kids into two groups: those that can have kids, and those that can't. Saying some couples who can't have kids "are of the 'kind' that really can have kids" seems awfully self-contradictory to me, but I understand that is the line you draw. The line itself is well-defined; no need to lecture me about your platonic ideals. The question remains: why draw the line there? Is it because of prejudice, or is it because of reason? If it is reason, what is the rational, the ethical reason for drawing it where you draw it?

Sigh. Yes. Everyone is subject to cognitive biases. The difference is whether somebody uses their intelect to rationalize believing what they find themselves believing, or whether they use their intellect to look past their cognitive biases and get to the truth. This is the difference between between Alma 32/Moroni 10 and the scientific method. This is the difference between motivated reasoning and rationality. This is the difference between faith and skepticism.

No, that isn't a fallacy. It's an assertion of a fact. It's just like saying, "correctly applying the principles of mathematics doesn't lead to believing 2 + 2 = 5." You can argue that I'm wrong and correctly applying the principles of mathematics does lead to the belief that 2 + 2 = 5. But in either case, it isn't a fallacy. That has nothing to do with what I said. My actual point is that correctly applying the tools of rationality leads to a naturalistic worldview. Sure, one can happen to have a naturalistic worldview because they were indoctrinated with those beliefs. But if somebody believes in something other than naturalism, it wasn't rationality that lead them there. I'm sorry if I was unclear. Let me be more blunt: God (especially as conceived by your religion) does not exist. This non-existing being isn't involved in our daily lives: he is NOT watching us have sex and tallying up sin points if we happen to do or feel something on the wrong side of the X|Y good-sex/bad-sex line. He hasn't sent messengers "to teach and correct." Those premises are all wrong. I haven't assumed it. I've asserted it. Let me clarify my point. Miracle of Forgiveness was written by a senior apostle, 4 years before becoming prophet. It was incredibly influential in the Church, and widely cited as an authoritative guide on sexual sin. And, we now know that a lot of what it says is false and harmful, and that the church has backed away from many of its teachings. I think we agree on that. With 20/20 hindsight, we now know that we shouldn't feel guilty for having sexual feelings. We now know that masturbation doesn't cause homosexuality. We now know that being sexually attracted to people of the same sex isn't a sin. We now know that homosexuals can't repent and become straight. And we now know that the immense guilt trip that Mormon kids were put through from 1969 until [early 2010's?] was wrong and unhealthy. In short, we now know that in the days of Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, etc., the prophets and apostles were not a reliable source for understanding what was and was not sinful in the bedroom. But now, you are 100% confident that unlike all the prophets from Abraham through Eztra Taft Benson, the role of prophets and apostles is now fundamentally different: their current views on sex can now finally be relied on as the eternal truth about what is and is not a sexual sin. Hallelujah. To be clear, I'm glad you reject all of these past teachings I'm alluding to, including the crap in the Bible, the crap in D&C 132, and the crap taught by 20th century prophets and apostles. You aren't obligated to believe any of that and to the extent you don't, I'm glad. My point is that this track record proves that Elder Runland was wrong when he said "the law of chastity is an eternal law." From the beginning of time through the late 20th century, the people you regard as prophets and apostles believed what their cultures (and in some cases their imaginations and libidos) taught them to believe and adjusted "the law of chastity" accordingly. Your motte is that until very recently "marriage" has always been defined as a relationship between a man and a woman. Your bailey is the idea that "the law of chastity" is an eternal, unchanging law that is clearly, reliably, and consistently taught to us by God's official representatives on earth.

Here's the thing. Over the last several decades, science has learned a ton about how the mind works, and the evolutionary theories about why it evolved this way. A couple of things our brains naturally do are confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. We have a very strong tendancy to make choices first based on sociological and psychological factors, and then use "reasoning" to rationalize these beliefs. If you read the "experiment" in Alma 32, it is designed to help somebody believe what they are trying to believe, and is a textbook example of relying on cognitive biases to achieve the desired beliefs. This faith-based approach is the polar opposite of the skepticism-based approach of the scientific method and bona fide reason in general. The "reasoning" you've laid out on where to draw the line between what sexual activities go into X and which go into Y has been so unpersuasive it comes across as offensive and not worth responding to. But maybe I misunderstand. So let's engage it. To help me understand where you draw the line and why, consider two hypothetical, similarly situated couples: Couple A: Andy and Abagail are a man and a woman. Abagail has no ovaries, so they cannot conceive a child together using their own sperm and eggs. Couple B: Bob and Brady are two men. They likewise cannot conceive a child together using their own sperm and eggs. All four are 30 and have never married. Both couples love each other deeply, have mature, healthy, honest, committed relationships, and live together in legally recognized domestic partnerships. As I understand your position, sex between either couple would fall into Y (unethical sex), even if its purpose were to express love and strengthen their relationship. If Andy and Abagail legally married, however, sex for that purpose would move into X. But if Bob and Brady legally married, sex for the same purpose would remain in Y because they are both men. Is that an accurate description of your position? If so, why does marriage make sex ethical for one couple but not the other? Both relationships involve the same love, commitment, legal marital status, and inability to conceive a child together. What morally relevant difference justifies treating them differently? What is your principled, reason-based rationale for drawing the line there?

He isn't wrong. Stuart Matis would still be alive today if he weren't indoctrinated with false beliefs about sex and was allowed to be with somebody he loved. Emphasis on "your view". Just because you think those are the only valid purposes of sex and just because you think "strengthening the marital union" between a man and woman is a valid thing but "strengthening the marital union" between two people of the same sex is not doesn't mean the place you draw the line isn't an ad hoc rationalization of your own prejudice. A Mormon friend of mine who is a widow just got married to another Mormon man who is a widower. They were both sealed to somebody else--according to the dogma, she'll be with her first husband in the next life. Because of some biological realities, it is impossible for her to have any children. Therefore, according to you, there is no reason for her to have gotten remarried, right? It is as biologically impossible for her to have children with her husband as it would be if she were married to another woman. And according to the dogma, she won't have children with him after they are dead, either. So according to your logic, there is absolutely no reason for her to have gotten remarried, right? The purpose of marriage is to have and raise kids. They can't have kids, and all their existing kids are raised. Were their reasons for getting married illegitimate? Consistently applying your logic, they must be, because they got married for exactly the same reason a same-sex couple presumably does.

From the perspective of objective reality, everything you say here is false. Reason doesn't lead to these beliefs. Sociological drivers and psychological manipulation do. Furthermore, I don't think it is healthy to believe that an innocent man was tortured and murdered because of your sins. That is a sick, unhealthy belief. And I think following false prophets is a bad idea in general. If you want to understand reality regarding sexual ethics, the last thing you should do is read Miracle of Forgiveness. Sex is important for some people. It isn't for others. It depends upon your own life's situation. Ideally, many things are much, much more important than being raised by "both a mother and father.": Protection from abuse and neglect. Warm, responsive relationships with dependable caregivers. Material security. A stable home with little destructive conflict. Good physical care from pregnancy onward Adequate nutrition, medical care, sleep, and physical activity Caregivers who can regulate their emotions and function reliably. Consistent, constructive parenting. Rich opportunities to learn. A safe, healthy neighborhood and physical environment. Social belonging and support beyond the immediate household. The "law of chastity" did not come from "the Lord". It came from inherited Christian sexual morality and American cultural norms. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing depends upon the individual who is indoctrinated with it. If you are well suited for it, then that's great. But you aren't dealing with reality if you imagine waiving a magic wand and it working for everybody else. But people have literally committed suicide because they were indoctrinated with these beliefs. Think about that. Sure. You can use a Venn Diagram to represent ethics. The issue isn't merely whether living in box X is a healthy way to live. What also matters is all of the bagage attached to it through the false religious beliefs. Beliefs that feelings are sinful, it's better to poke out your eye than be aroused by looking at somebody, that doing so is a sin which caused Jesus to be tortured and killed, that having those feelings makes you unworthy of God, that if you experimented with something you are a chewed up piece of gum, etc. The question isn't whether they are reasonable. The question is whether they are healthy. I think sexual ethics should be judged by what they do for actual people. Do they help us treat each other well, make informed decisions, and build satisfying lives? Science cannot decide our ultimate values for us. But if we care about human well-being, evidence should matter more than whether a rule is called sacred. That points toward an ethic built around freely given, informed consent, honesty, mutual consideration, and responsibility for consequences. Consent requires the capacity to choose, freedom from pressure, and the ability to stop. It is essential, but it isn’t the whole story. The same standards should apply regardless of sex or sexual orientation. Keeping commitments matters. So do emotional readiness, contraception, preventing infections, and the welfare of children. Nobody owes anybody sex, including a spouse. Pleasure and intimacy are legitimate goods; freely chosen abstinence is legitimate too. Children need accurate, age-appropriate education about bodies, boundaries, and relationships. As they mature, that should include contraception and sexual decision-making. Comprehensive sex education does not make young people more sexually active and can improve safer behavior. We can encourage patience and self-control without withholding information or making sexual development frightening. The Mormon Church teaches several things that fit this approach: fidelity, commitment, respect for others, and opposition to sexual coercion, including within marriage. It recognizes marital intimacy as an expression of love, not just a means of producing children. Those are healthy teachings. But the Church goes beyond that and says that this is all a matter of moral cleanliness, purity, and worthiness before God, and then proceeds to rack on on incredible amounts of unnecessary guilt for things that are parts of normal, healthy sexual development, to say nothing of making rules that say if you are sexually attracted to somebody of the same sex, then you are precluded from ever having a sexual life, even one based on fidelity, commitment, monogamy, and respect. The surrounding framework matters: sexual conduct and thoughts are evaluated through moral cleanliness, repentance, and worthiness to enter the temple. Masturbation is a typical part of adolescent sexual development. Treating it as a nasty sin that makes you impure and unworthy is an evil thing to teach. When I was a Boy Scout, my scoutmaster/deacon leader taught that the problem with touching yourself is that you'll soon get board of touching yourself and will then want to touch other boys, and that it would thereby make you gay. Can you see the problem with teaching false things? The difficulty is especially clear for gay and lesbian members who want a loving partnership. The Church offers no approved sexual relationship with a same-sex spouse. It teaches that for them, obedience can mean lifelong abstinence from the kind of relationship they desire. Research links religious sexual stigma with psychological distress through internalized stigma and religious struggle. Other people can struggle with this framework too. Someone with religious OCD may become trapped in checking thoughts, confessing, and seeking reassurance about purity. That is a recognized clinical problem. I would also worry about survivors who already feel contaminated, unmarried adults who want intimacy, and spouses who struggle to reconcile pleasure with years of vigilance against lust. Their needs deserve individual attention. I don’t think these teachings are universally healthy. The evidence gives good reason to believe some people would be better off never having internalized the idea that ordinary sexual behavior, or a loving relationship, makes them spiritually unclean. We cannot rerun somebody’s childhood and measure the difference, so that remains a reasoned judgment rather than a universal experimental finding. I want an ethic that teaches people to be responsible and considerate while allowing them to feel at home in their own bodies. A religious rule should have to earn its reputation for being healthy by how it affects the people expected to live it. "Principled and reasoned disagreement" about whether consenting adults who love each other should be allowed to have a consenting, committed, loving life together because of the reasons you've outlined (e.g. the plumbing doesn't fit) are neither principled nor reasoned.

I can't tell if you are serious or not. Yes, if your goal is to reproduce, "same-sex behavior" isn't going to get you there. Nobody has claimed otherwise. Ever. But if your goal is to have a happy life with a social structure full of good people and friends that you can love, bond with, rely on, and be compatible with, then whether or not your relationship with them has procreative capacity isn't the only consideration, and might not be a consideration at all. For most people, sex is a tiny part of marriage. And procreation is a tiny part of sex. Your obsession with sex is weird.

Here is my point. You defend your interpretation of marriage and the law of chastity by appealing to children’s welfare in terms of growing up in an optimal home, their right to both biological parents, the need to perpetuate the species, and how all of this benefits society. This all comes across as ad hoc rationalizations that contradict much of what’s in your scriptures and what they imply God values. Start with concubinage. There were two institutions for owning women and having a license to have sex with them: marriage and concubinage. The Bible distinguishes them (2 Samuel 5:13; Genesis 25:5–6). The Hebrew bible defines adultery differently than you do. You think adultery is having sex outside of your own marriage. In contrast, in biblical Hebrew law, adultery means having sex with another man’s wife or betrothed partner. Sex with a woman who is neither married nor betrothed is not classified as adultery, even if the man himself is married. See Leviticus 20:10. Deuteronomy 22:23–24 explains why the punishment is so harsh; it isn't because you betrayed your own wife by having sex with somebody else, it is because "he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife." The decisive marital status is hers, not his. There was no expectation of sexual fidelity on the part of the husband, and having sex with others didn't harm his wives and concubines. In contrast, Exodus 22:16–17 treats having sex with an unbetrothed virgin differently than having sex with somebody else’s wife: the man must pay the bride-price and marry her, unless her father refuses the marriage, in which case the payment remains due because her economic value to her father was still damaged. These rules make it clear that first and foremost, the law of chastity was about harming property that belong to other men (either the woman’s husband or father), and not about being sexually faithful to your own partner. A married man having sex with a woman who didn’t belong to somebody else was a no-harm-no-foul situation. And D&C 132 closes off the explanation that God merely tolerated these arrangements because of the surrounding culture. Verses 34–35 say he commanded Abraham’s union with Hagar. Verses 37–39 endorse the patriarchs’ concubines and say God gave David his wives and concubines. According to the D&C, these arrangements received explicit divine approval. Look at what the revelation promises Joseph: a throne (verse 49), rulership (verse 53), and a hundredfold increase in “houses and lands, wives and children” (verse 55). Wives and children are rewards bestowed on the man, along with houses and land. Emma, meanwhile, is threatened with destruction if she refuses the prescribed arrangement (verses 52–54). The man’s authority and promised glory are spelled out. So are the consequences for a wife who objects. The effect that all this has on the welfare of the children is not a consideration. Verses 61–63 authorize ten virgins under the prescribed conditions, explaining that the man does not commit adultery because “they belong to him.” But, of course, adding wives and children does not multiply the father’s time or income. Why would God command such things when they can be expected to harm children? The costs could be severe. In Sherilyn Farnes’s study published by BYU, Apostle Amasa Lyman’s household suffered persistent problems with financial support. He had eight wives and nearly forty children. In 1853, Eliza Partridge Lyman wrote: “I have lived without bread when some of the family [i.e. other wives and other children] had bread to throw to the pigs.” This was during his apostleship, years before his departure from the Church. Farnes also notes that high church office could bring pressure to take plural wives even when a man was not a good provider. Polygamy under Brigham Young wasn’t about an optimal family relationship that benefits children and society. Calling these sacrifices necessary for exaltation would concede my point: other religious objectives took priority over those children’s welfare. Why would God command arrangements that expose children to those costs? How does the father’s promised glory answer the child’s need for food and attention? If a man desires wives and concubines he can have them because he desires them and having them will give him glory. Their welfare isn’t part of the calculus. Then there is Paul, whose preference produces no children at all. In 1 Corinthians 7, he merely permits marital sex and tells spouses not to deprive each other (verses 3–5). But he prefers celibacy and recommends marriage for those unable to exercise self-control (verses 7–9). His reasoning concerns the present distress, the shortness of time, and undivided devotion to God (verses 26–35). Perpetuating the species is conspicuously absent from that argument and not something he valued. You seem to suggest that this is all just descriptive and that earlier prophets and apostles may have mistakenly attributed their cultural assumptions about marriage and sex to God. That is certainly conceivable. But assuming that the true law of chastity doesn't change with the times, why do you believe God’s pattern of revelation has now dramatically changed? Why is only God now telling prophets and apostles the truth about the laws of chastity when he didn’t do so before?

What are your thoughts on all of the scriptures in the Old Testament, New Testament, and D&C that contradict your views about marriage and sex?

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

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

Smac, I’m done. Your motte-and-bailey accusation goes well beyond saying my proposal would have harmful consequences. You are accusing me of knowingly pursuing a broader agenda, treating its harmful consequences as intended features, and concealing it behind a more defensible position. That is an accusation of both dishonesty and malicious intent. And a central piece of your evidence is that I’m a smart guy. Apparently, I’m too smart to honestly disagree with your predictions, so I must secretly know you’re right. As if your confidence in your conclusions is evidence of my dishonesty. I’ve explained why restrooms need not have the same rules as prisons, shelters, or sports. You treat those distinctions as camouflage. If I explain myself, I’m defending the motte. If I deny your accusation, I’m retreating to it. What could I possibly say that you wouldn’t interpret as further concealment? You said you were working to improve your conversations by following Steven Collis’s Habits of a Peacemaker. You specifically highlighted resisting the temptation to caricature another person’s position. How does assigning me a malicious agenda, then dismissing my stated beliefs as a cover story, put that into practice? That is an extraordinarily cynical way to treat someone who has spent weeks explaining himself to you. Your catastrophe analysis fails to engage with the Massachusetts evidence we’ve discussed. It doesn’t settle everything, but a long list of things that hypothetically could go wrong doesn't change the evidence about what actually happened when we allowed manly-looking people to use the women’s restroom rather than forcing them into the women’s as you want the law to do. I’ve been sincerely trying to explain my point of view. You’ve chosen to treat those explanations as concealment of something sinister. There’s no productive conversation left under those terms.

I'm not so sure, and that type of behavior isn’t exactly what I was talking about. Here is all of my personal experience. Once, my wife was having a birthday party at a busy bar/restaurant. This was about 15 years ago. One of our guests grabbed my arm and said, “Analytics! You’ve got to see this!” She then proceeded to try and drag me into the women’s restroom. I refused to go, but she absolutely insisted and refused to give up. Finally so as to not make a scene, I reluctantly followed her in. Everybody stopped what they were doing and look at me. My host said, “It’s all right everyone! He’s with me!” With that, everybody exhaled and ignored me. She showed me there was a whiteboard in the restroom, and somebody had drawn an extravagant birthday message for my wife. I spent a tenth of a second admiring it, and got the heck out. Perhaps 5 years ago, I was at a crowded downtown venue, and there was a very long line for the women’s room, and a very short line for the men’s. A woman who was an unambiguously cisgender woman got into the short line for the men’s room. She waited her turn, used the toilet, washed her hands, and got out. Everybody there felt quite uncomfortable, but everyone very deliberately ignored her. About a year after that, I was in exactly the same situation, but this time a woman asked me for permission to use the men’s room, because she had to go very badly and couldn’t wait in the women’s line. I gave her permission to use the toilet. She went in, took care of business, and got out. Again, everyone ignored her. Likewise, when Lily Contino used the women’s restroom in Disneyworld, everyone politely ignored her and nobody made a stink about it until her videos went viral, and even then, the main objection was her videoing other people in the restroom and not her presence there. Compare that to the videos Smac collects that show people whipping out there cellphones and recording themselves saying, “I just saw a tranny go into the women’s restroom, and I’m going to confront them on video when they come out!” One person in his collection actually flew across the Atlantic Ocean in order to generate this type of content, and when she got impatient waiting for the person she was stalking to use the restroom, decided to confront her in a hallway with the accusatory question, “You’re a man! What bathroom to you use???!!!!” That isn’t healthy.

Smac, I favor people ordinarily using the restroom corresponding to their gender identity and making that decision themselves. That includes transgender women who are biologically male, without requiring them to prove their sincerity or look sufficiently feminine. I prefer that approach because everyone needs to use the restroom, and people should ordinarily be able to do so without having their appearance or sex investigated. Someone could abuse that discretion. But the possibility of abuse doesn’t establish that policing eligibility would produce better outcomes, including for biological women and girls. Your rule would also direct transgender men, including people with beards and thoroughly masculine appearances, into the women’s restroom. So encountering someone who looks male wouldn’t even establish that your rule was being broken. That matters beyond the occasional mistaken complaint. I worry about encouraging a culture in which people scrutinize strangers, challenge their presence, and shame them for looking like they don’t belong. You say you don’t condone that behavior, but you also watch and circulate videos of self-righteous culture warriors policing bathrooms, including in this thread. Sharing a video isn’t necessarily endorsing everything in it. But how we frame and circulate these encounters matters. Are we discouraging intrusive scrutiny, or encouraging viewers to see it as protecting women? Women and girls deserve to be left alone. And I think we’re better off extending ordinary grace than looking for reasons to police each other. I understand that my approach doesn’t preserve an exclusively female admission rule. We disagree about whether preserving that boundary is a good thing in terms of how it would require masculine-looking people to use the lady’s room, to mention nothing of the costs of enforcing it. I favor leaving people quietly using the facilities alone, with intervention for specific evidence of harassment, intimidation, voyeurism, or other improper conduct. You say your rule can be enforced through rare, fact-specific complaints. Suppose a patron reports that someone washing her hands looks male. What additional evidence, if any, would justify intervention, and how would staff establish that person’s sex?

Biological women and girls is specifically what I asked asked Grok, Claude, and GPT to consider when comparing our policies. According to their analysis, your policy harms biological women and girls, and harms transgender women and girls. Their answers aren't proof, and you can challenge their reasoning. But interpreting the exercise as broadening “women and girls” misses the question I actually asked. You said, “I can weigh the same facts and think dissolving the criterion is the worse package. That is a policy fight.” Yes. But establishing that your rule excludes all males doesn't establish that it produces the better outcome for biological females. I understand that preserving that exclusion is itself something you value. We still need to consider what enforcing it does to the people you intend to protect. Women and girls have a right to be left alone. A woman shouldn't have to establish her sex to strangers simply because they think she looks masculine. Suppose someone reports her, she produces identification, and the encounter ends with an apology. She has nevertheless been scrutinized and made to justify her presence while simply using the restroom. What prevents that from happening again and again and again? Being left alone is a substantial part of the privacy we should be protecting. A policy that invites people to question whether somebody belongs can undermine that privacy, even when they meet your criterion for admission. And there is something to be said for extending ordinary grace from the other direction, too. I think we're better off letting other people go about their lives without making their appearance our business. Responding to harassment or threatening behavior is one thing. Looking around for someone whose presence we might object to isn't healthy. Finally, applying the same harm test to different situations (i.e. restrooms, changing rooms, sports, shelters, and prisons) does not require the same result. Exposure, competitive fairness, and confinement change the analysis. Someone can carry the basic framework of harm and cost into any other policy question without establishing that it warrants the same outcome. Which policy better protects biological women and girls, including their privacy and their ability to go about their business undisturbed? That is the comparison I think we should focus on.

My point is that this isn’t happening and despite your assertions to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that it will happen. Just as we don’t need laws to keep litter boxes out of elementary school bathrooms, we don’t need laws to keep men out of the women’s restroom. As I’ve made it very clear throughout this conversation, I believe we shouldn’t have laws unless there is a need for them, and that such laws should be crafted in a way that ensures they don’t do more harm than good. I don’t know why you think it would be bad to extend that same reasoning to women’s changing rooms, sports, or prisons. Sigh. I’m against the bathroom law you propose because it is bad for women and girls. Your insinuation that I have some sort of ideological master goal of crowding out women from women’s sports, defeating the purpose of women’s shelters, and causing the eradication of women’s-only spaces is both inaccurate and offensive. If being against laws that do more harm than good makes me an ideologue, then so be it.

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