smac97

Yes, I acknowledge that this view exists. I've discussed it many times on this board. I've never challenged its existence, but rather its coherence and factual accuracy. Disagreement about a fact is not evidence that there is no fact. People argued for centuries about the shape of the earth and the causes of disease. The length of the argument did not make both sides right. It meant at least one side was wrong, or they were talking about different things. Twenty-one pages here prove that we are dug in. They do not prove that sex is a spectrum. Language is fluid, sure. But sex is not. You can use “woman” for an adult human female, or for anyone who claims the word. Those are two definitions. Only one of them names a reproductive class that exists whether or not we like the vocabulary. People with differing backgrounds and perspectives can and do disagree about whether "woman" should be defined in a way that includes men. That is sociology of which sentence people will say. It is not a finding that both sentences are equally true of the body. “No one has the power to control the definition” is true of English in the street. It is false as a claim about biology, law and other important contexts. Biologists did not invent two gamete types by committee. Midwives did not invent male and female by “life experience.” We can fight over which word to put on a form, but we cannot vote ovaries into being a "social construct." So who is right? If the question is “which meaning will win in HR and media,” that is politics, and you are right that no single poster owns the language. If the question is “how many sexes are there, and is a male a woman,” that is not a lifestyle preference. You are certainly free to use “woman” to refer to men socially. I will not agree that the existence of two opinions makes the two definitions equally valid descriptions of reality. The useful split is still the one we already have. Perhaps we should say which definition we are each using, than then argue the policy. I think we should not treat a stalemate about words as proof that the underlying distinction is optional. I think it is beyond dispute that sex-segregated spaces have, until fairly recently, segregated by sex, not by subjective "self-identity." Radically re-defining "woman" to include men within it reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln asked: “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?” He answered: “Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.” Variants of this story sometimes attribute the quote to a calf's tail instead of a dog's tail. The lesson means that words alone cannot alter reality. If someone asks "How many subcategories of 'woman' are there?", the answer, I think would be: "There are no subcategories. There's just "woman." Fabricating neologisms like "cis woman" and "trans woman" to as to facilitate the re-definition of "woman" to include men, doesn't make these men women. Words alone cannot alter reality. Thanks, -Smac

"Christian" is, in terms of religious taxonomy, a category in which "Latter-day Saint" is a subcategory (along with Catholic, Baptist, etc.). "Woman" is, in terms of biological sex taxonomy, a category that ends, with no subcategories underneath it. Activists, apparently understanding the lack of any subcategories have sought to fabricate one. This is, I think how we ended up with "cis woman," above which is "woman" and besides which is "trans woman." "Cis woman" and "trans women" have therefore been presented as new subcategories of "woman." This is an ideological and sociological effort, not really a medical/biological one (though some inroads have been made). This is what creates rhetorical cover for stuff like "trans women are women" (that is, "trans women" are a subcategory of "women"). I think the rhetorical innovation of the "cis" label is worth discussing, if for no other reason than to evaluate its legitimacy in a given context. See, for example, this video: The guy is clearly trolling this woman to make a point, and she is letting herself be trolled, but the point is nevertheless made: I think we all know, in the end, that "trans women" are not really women. The only way we get there is if we radically re-define "women" to include men in it. I think that redefinition is on par to redefining "dog" to include "cat," "planet" to include "comet," "Joseph Smith" to include "Tim Curry," and so on. Dogs and cats have some similarities (both four-legged mammals with fur, etc.), but the differences matter enough that conflating them doesn't work. I would therefore resist ideological efforts to redefine "dog" to include "cat." Planets and comets have some similarities (both are in space, both move, both are visible, orbit the sun, formed at the same time, etc.), but the differences matter enough that conflating them doesn't work. I would therefore resist ideological efforts to redefine "planet" to include "comet." Joseph Smith and Tim Curry have some similarities (both are male humans, known of by millions of people, etc.), but the differences matter enough that conflating them doesn't work. I would therefore resist ideological efforts to redefine "Joseph Smith" to include "Tim Currey." Men and women have some similarities (same species, bipedal, etc.), but the differences matter enough that conflating them doesn't work. I would therefore resist ideological efforts to redefine "woman" to include men. And the movement to an exclusionary definition is ideological, not rational. I am fine if "Mormon" is excluded from "Protestantism" or "Catholicism" or "Baptist." It would be inaccurate and dishonest to conflate the two. Same goes, I think, for excluding "man" from "woman." Conflating the two is dishonest and inaccurate. I am fine with a good deal of this. Male and female are real. Traits can fail to line up. Medicine is not a cocktail party. “Trans women are women” does not mean the karyotype changed. Courtesy is not the same as a sports rule. If the ask is only “define terms and argue the interest at stake,” I am already there. Again, the Mormon/Christian comparison is useful, up to a point. Switching the boundary of “Christian” does not change what Latter-day Saints believe. Switching the boundary of “woman” does not change who produces which gamete. We agree on that. However, the next sentence is the one that matters: Some boundaries are conventional titles, and some name a natural class. “Elder” for an 18-year-old is an office. “Woman” for an adult human female is not. You can ostensibly add a second, social use of the word. But you cannot then treat people who keep the first use as if they had refused to hear you, or that they are "bigots," etc. That is where the analogy fails. When evangelicals say “Mormons aren’t Christians,” they are usually saying “not Nicene.” When I say a male is not a woman, I am not inventing a creed. I am keeping the sexed meaning of the word that still does the work in medicine, sport, and single-sex spaces. You say those are “separate policy questions.” In the institutions that actually write the rules, they are often not treated as separate. “Trans women are women” is used as the reason the bathroom, the prison wing, and the category are already settled. If you personally do not mean that, say so plainly. Many of the groups using the sentence do mean that. On the biology, nobody I know who says “sex is binary” is attempting to convey the idea that thinks every sex-related trait is a two-valued switch. Shared developmental machinery, DSDs, and clownfish sequential hermaphroditism are all real. Clownfish changing reproductive role is still a change from one sex to the other, not evidence that sex is a smear. Nor is it evidence that homo sapiens can change from one sex to the other. There is no substantive comparison between A) a clownfish undergoing actual biologica/physiological changes to go from one sex to the other, and B) a man who has taken cosmetic, medical and sartorial measures to deliberately appear and "identify" as a woman (and also, since there are no boundaries for being "trans" apart from the subjective sel-identity, men who have not undergone these measures, and who therefore still look like men in ever material respect). Atypical alignment is how we describe a disorder or a species with a different life history. It is not a third human sex, and it is not a warrant for “the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic” as a conclusion about how many sexes there are. Magazine essays that grant ovaries and testes, then deny the binary, are doing the split-definition move we already walked through. On “assigned at birth”: in a delivery-room chart it means the clinician recorded the observed sex, almost always from genitalia. That is mundane. The phrase is also used, repeatedly, to recast that observation as a "guess" or arbitrary choice that a person's later subjective "identity" may correct. I did not invent that second use. It is why the wording was adopted in advocacy and then in forms. I can use the medical sense when that is all that is meant. I will not pretend the political sense is a hallucination. On ordinary social life: I can call someone by a requested name without agreeing that they are a woman. We all know that "Eminem" was not born with that name, and we also know that he is not a piece of candy-covered chocolate. He's an adult male named Marshall Mathers. I wouldn't insist on calling him that because social conventions generally aren't worth the fuss. So going along with them is courtesy, but also a refusal to let the social use swallow the sexed one. When relating to another human being, identity and presentation matter more than gonads” is, as you noted a choice of "emphasis." It is coherent as etiquette and avoiding a fuss. It becomes the disputed tenet the moment it is treated as the definition that must govern every use of “woman,” or as proof that keeping the sexed definition is uncharitable or bigoted, or that biologically inaccurate pronouns are inaccurate, or that men should be legally entitled into women's spaces. So I will define terms: Sex = reproductive class (two). Gender identity = self-description / inner sense. "Woman," in the sense I will not give up = adult human female. You may use woman for a social role. We can then argue bathrooms, sports, and prisons as separate questions. What I will not do is accept that because those questions are separate, “trans women are women” is only a harmless social definition, or that noticing how the slogan is used in policy is a failure of good faith. We've hashed and re-hashed the point regarding the definition of "woman." I reject the notion that "woman" can our should be radically redefined so as to sever it from its sexed meaning by including men in its meaning. That simply does not work when we are speaking of a biological binary. You nevertheless accept that notion. I find that notion to be a departure from "empirical reality," you do not. "Trans woman" is a rhetorical shortcut for "a man who claims to be a a woman because he subjectively 'identifies' as one." I'm not sufficiently vested in the argument over whether "trans women" can be further subdivided into Blanchard's typology ("homosexual transsexuals" who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance, and "autogynephilic transsexuals" who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body (autogynephilia)) or not. My understanding is that this typology is fairly controversial in the trans community for a variety of reasons (pathologization, inconsistent with "lived experience," rhetorical usage by ideological opponents, etc.). I am curious whether "trans women" would object to being labeled a "homosexual transsexual" or a "autogynephile." I suspect many would. Thanks, -Smac

If the two sentences describe the same property at the same level, then yes: they cannot both be true, any more than a circle can be square. You are right about the logic if we split the word “sex” to refer to both A) biological sex (there are only two) and B) sex-related traits (there are more than two, and each trait can vary). “Humans are organized around two reproductive sexes” and “many sex-related traits vary in degree, and sometimes they do not all line up” can both be true. That is the view I have been defending. DSDs show that development can be atypical, but they do not show a third reproductive sex. Two gamete types, two sexes: a binary, not a spectrum of sexes. The AI answer changes the question. It stops asking whether sex can be both binary and a spectrum, and asks instead whether there can be two sexes and variable sex-related traits. Of course there can. That is not a contradiction. The original pairing is incompatible when both sentences use “sex” for the same thing. If “sex is a spectrum” means “there are not two sexes, or the two sexes are only a rough sketch we may discard,” then it negates “sex is binary” in the reproductive-class sense. And vice-versa. One statement necessarily negates the other. The "sex is a spectrum" slogan is usually both rhetorically and logically utilized when discussing public policy: not as a tangential note about hormone curves, but as a fundamental differentiation of biological sex into more than "male" and "female" (thus ostensibly allowing the speaker to rhetorically characterize these two categories as “naïve”). Age is actually a pretty good contrasting comparison because it is a spectrum. Age is continuous. Nobody says “age is binary” because the law sometimes divides that spectrum into a binary (adult/child, adult/minor). In many ways, though, the "spectrum" is maintained in the law. My son is 17, and so can get a driver's license. His cousin in Georgia is 13 and cannot. Both are legally classified as "children," but they are still differentiated from each other in some ways. When I was 17 I joined the Army National Guard. At the time I had a niece who was an infant. Both I and my niece were legally classified as "children," but I could serve in the military and my niece could not. And so on. This all goes away, though, when we set aside the legal adult/child "binary" in which there is a spectrum of ages, and speak of the biological sex male/female binary, in which there is not a spectrum of sexes. Just the two. My youngest son is 17. Neighbors: a 2-year-old girl; a 12-year-old girl and 9-year-old boy; a 14-year-old boy, 12-year-old boy, and 9-year-old girl. All of those people can be classed as children, and age within that class is a spectrum: 2, 9, 12, 14, 17. If we ask sex, each is male or female. That is all. We do not slice “male” and “female” into further biological sexes. IOW, we can describe trait variation as spectral and still have two sexes. We cannot treat that variation as if it replaced the two sexes or created a spectrum of more than two. Thanks, -Smac

But not incongruent with an ecclesiastical title. I'm afraid you are not going to persuade me that "assigned at birth" is not only misappropriated to equivocate and obfuscate, but also that this misappropriation happens quite a lot. Clinicians may use it in the way you suggest, but everyday usage is frequently obfuscatory. "Six is binary" and "sex is a spectrum" are logically incompatible with each other. The verity of one negates the other. People use “sex” in more than one way. Sometimes they mean which reproductive class (small gametes or large). Sometimes they mean the cluster of traits that usually go with that class—hormones, genitals, build, voice, behavior. Those are related facts. They are not the same fact. Saying both sentences can be true if you switch definitions mid-argument is not scientific sophistication. That is equivocation works. The “elder” comparison actually cuts the other way. Latter-day Saints call an 18-year-old an elder as an office. Nobody then insists he is elderly, or that “old” is a spectrum that abolishes age. The title does not cancel the ordinary meaning. What I object to is the move that does cancel it: use “sex” as trait-cluster long enough to say “spectrum,” then take that as permission to deny that the person is male or female in the reproductive-class sense, or else or to treat that class as optional in sport, medicine, and law. Fuentes himself has said gametes are binary. The rest of the argument is that bodies and behavior overlap, so “human beings are not two types.” Overlap of phenotypes is expected. It does not create a third gamete or a continuous series of sexes. Ainsworth’s Nature piece is mostly about DSDs: development can go off-script. Off-script is still scripted toward one of two sexes. Complexity of the pathway is not a spectrum of endpoints. So I am not claiming “sex” can never be used loosely for sexed traits. I am claiming that when the dispute is “how many sexes are there?” or “does identity replace sex?,” the "load-bearing" meaning is the reproductive one. Calling that insistence “scientifically illiterate” only works if the trait-bundle definition has already been sworn in as the real one. That is the point at issue, not a referee’s ruling. If someone says, “Male and female are the sexes; many traits vary around those two peaks,” we agree. If they say, “Because traits vary, sex is a spectrum, so the binary is naive,” they have changed the subject and then declared victory. I can be courteous about language, but I cannot pretend those two claims are the same sentence in two dialects. I can take the weak version of that sentence. Humans name things. We decide which traits to put on a birth record. Categories are tools. None of that means gonads are a committee vote. The survey does not show that “sex is a social construct” is the scientific view of sex. It shows that in a 2024 poll of SICB instructors who answered a survey on sex-diverse, gender-inclusive teaching, 42% agreed with that wording—about 14% “absolutely,” 28% “somewhat.” The sample is small and self-selected. The authors themselves note that calling sex socially constructed “feels counter to the major definitions of sex that biologists are taught.” That is not a referendum of biology. It is a snapshot of one society’s classroom politics. What they say they mean is also thinner than the slogan. “We choose how to combine genomic, gonadal, hormonal, and morphological facts when we assign categories” is a point about classification, not about whether males and females exist. Every science draws lines (species, planet, adult). The line does not invent the thing. Midwives recording “male” from external genitalia are almost always observing the reproductive class already there. Calling that “assignment” is the paperwork theory again. The strong reading, the one that does work in these debates, is that because we draw the line, the line is optional, so identity can overwrite sex. That does not follow from “people use words.” It would follow only if there were no fact underneath the word. But there is a fact underneath the word: two gamete types, two typical developmental pathways. How we talk about edge cases does not unmake the two classes. So: internally consistent as a claim about labels? Yes. Coherent as a claim that sex is not a biological binary? No. The 42% figure is not a discovery that gonads are culture. It is evidence that a contested slogan has a constituency in one corner of academic biology. Constituency is not the same thing as the finding. We've previously had discussions about credentialism and scientism. The Academy is not exactly covering itself in glory these days as pertaining to Third Rail topics, particularly those as viciously enforced as trans ideology (where else do people get to not only baselessly declare those with principles arguments to be "bigots" but do so in public, and have it be a nice big virtue signal?). A committee can stipulate a definition for the pages of its report. That is not the same thing as discovering what a woman is. The National Academies text you quote is explicit about what it is doing. It says the terms are used differently by context, that this “may cause confusion,” and that in that report “women” will include anyone who identifies as a woman or girl, “regardless of biological sex traits.” That is a scope rule for a women’s-health document, not a finding that identity is sex. The same glossary still defines female by genitalia, internal organs, or XX without SRY. They split the words because they know the identity definition and the sex definition are not the same thing. Calling it “just a definition” does not make it immune to criticism. Definitions can be circular, empty, or unfit for the work they are asked to do. “A woman is anyone who identifies as one” is circular: it uses woman to explain woman. It cannot tell you who has a uterus, who should be in a female drug trial, or who is protected by a women’s-sports rule. An 18-year-old “elder” is an office. Nobody then uses that title to deny that “old” means aged. The identity definition is being used to replace the sexed meaning of woman in law and medicine, not to sit beside it as a church office sits beside ordinary English. So I am not saying a report is linguistically illegal. I am saying this definition does not capture the class “adult human female,” and that publishing it in an academic consensus study does not make the substitution true. If the modest claim is “this committee chose inclusive wording for funding and outreach,” fine. But if the claim is “therefore a woman is anyone who says so,” that is still the tenet, and a glossary entry is not an argument for it. CDC Guidelines "say" this? Now? Are you sure about that? I do not think anyone claims the cells “magically transform.” That is your paraphrase of my objection, not my objection. The dispute is whether a male who identifies as a woman is a woman—that is, an adult female human—or whether “woman” has been retasked to mean “person with a female identity.” Those are different claims. Only one of them needs magic. The other needs a new dictionary. “Trans women are women” is a ideological definition, not a neutral one that floats above argument. It is the conclusion. It asserts that the identity is membership in the class. Calling it “just a definition” is how you avoid defending that assertion. The CDC sentence is the same move in public-health prose: “transgender women are women who were assigned male sex at birth.” In the next breath those guidelines note that most have not had genital surgery and may retain a functional penis, because anatomy still matters for disease. The agency is using "identity" language and sexed medicine in the same paragraph. That is not a demonstration that they are the same thing. It is a demonstration that the wording and the biology have come apart. Dictionaries follow usage. When institutions repeat “trans women are women,” lexicographers add a sense. Merriam-Webster’s primary adjective for female is still “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs.” A later sense about gender identity is an add-on, not the discovery that eggs were a social role all along. Updating a glossary does not rewrite gametes. What people who say the slogan are claiming, when it is doing any work, is this: for bathrooms, sports, prisons, prizes, and the word “she,” treat this male as a woman. They do not need to claim a new karyotype. They need you to treat the identity as sufficient. That is exactly the load-bearing tenet. I can be polite about names. I cannot agree that courtesy has changed the sex, or that a CDC clause and a revised dictionary entry make “trans women are women” into something other than a contested (and radical) redefinition. Thanks, -Smac

Picking up where I left off with @theplains... As a preliminary matter, I appreciate both your participation and your extensive knowledge and research on these matters. Perhaps I have misunderstood, and if so I apologize. In your post you quoted then-Elder Ezra T. Benson, who - in speaking about the ban - quoted Joseph Smith: "The Prophet Joseph Smith understood this principle when he said, 'the curse is not yet taken off from the sons of Canaan, neither will be until it is affected by as great a power as caused it to come.'" You then said: "This teaching clearly shows the ban was caused by God and that it would only be revoked by as great a power as caused it to come (meaning by God, not by earthly men)." Because you had just quoted Benson quoting Joseph, I thought that by "this teaching" you were referring to Joseph Smith's comment, which you characterized as "clearly show{ing} the band was caused by God" (presumably through Joseph Smith, whom you had just finished quoting (through Benson), and therefore that the caused-by-God-through-Joseph-Smith ban "would only be revoked" by the same "power as caused" the ban, namely, "by God." Did I misunderstand you? Yes, we can count the "few" documented ones on one hand and still have a fingers left over: See also here: Well, we still run into the problem of whether it actually was "doctrine." There is no record in the archives of the Church of any revelation on this matter. Do we agree on that? If so, is is possible that that there was no such revelation, and that opinions and conjecture on the ban (including from Joseph Smith) became characterized as "doctrine" despite the lack of any known revelatory provenance for it? I think you will have a hard time accusing the Brethren of "trying to bury some of its church history," particularly given Richard L. Bushman's comments. From a 2022 post cataloguing the Church's efforts to present a candid telling of its history: I think a church trying to "hide" its history would not spend such enormous amounts of time, money and effort to publish to the world, for free, the foregoing resourced about its history. I'm not sure I understand what this quote is intended to show. Could you elaborate? See above. Early LDS leaders viewed it as a directive from God. Generally, yes. But the question remains: Might it be that the ban was not revelatory, but that the removal of it was? That the ban "was not revelatory," at least in a prima facia case sort of way, is indicated by the absence of any known revelation establishing it (though we also have pretty good supplemental evidences as to its origins, such as the 1852 address to the Utah Territorial Legislature). Yes, this seems to be true. Perhaps the leaders of the Church, unsure as to the actual origins of the ban, but not quite willing to disregard it as mere "policy," felt that "a revelation from God was needed." I don't think we can say "this is not true." I think it is accurate to say that we cannot establish any revelatory provenance for the ban from the Church's records. The above characterization therefor works for me. That was certainly a part of what prompted him. How do you know what Pres. Kimball "specifically" chose to omit from his remarks? Also, given that the ban was directed at "those of {sub-Saharan African}-descent," did he really need to specifically "mention" them? IMO, on the Lord's timetable. See my above quotes re: Pres. McKay ("I have prayed and prayed and prayed, but there has been no answer" ... "I'm badgered constantly about giving the priesthood to the Negro. I've inquired of the Lord repeatedly. The last time I did it was late last night. I was told, with no discussion, not to bring the subject up with the Lord again; that the time will come, but it will not be my time, and to leave the subject alone."). I agree. But I don't see how that creates a "therefore we know that the priesthood ban was instituted by God"-style argument. That does not seem to follow. The sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden is taught in several LDS Church publications. Here are just a few: [1] Chapter 45 of the seminary manual (Religion 211–212 - New Testament Student Manual). "Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God the Eternal Father. He is our Creator. He is our Teacher. He is our Savior. His atonement paid for the sin of Adam and won victory over death, assuring resurrection and immortality for all men". [2] October 1979 General Conference talk by President Marion G. Romney, recorded in the November Ensign article "Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ". "It [the gospel plan] anticipated the need for a Savior to win the victory over death, atone for the sin of Adam, which brought death, and provide the means whereby men, through repentance, may receive forgiveness for personal sins and be readmitted into the presence of God". Satan led Adam and Eve astray. In a sense, yes. But the discussion here is whether the leaders of the Church have led members "astray." I don't think they have. By "good", I assume you mean "good" from a moral perspective. I think that is generally what Joseph Smith was going for, yes. Okay. But the issue here is whether Latter-day Saint leaders have done this, and/or if the Lord will allow it. I think the answer to both inquiries is "No." Well, I think we need to see this in context: Right. But none of these leaders in other faith traditions is referenced in the excerpt from Pres. Woodruff's addresses which seem to be the source of this "astray" concept: Nobody in the Church has said that leaders in Islamic, Hindu and JW faith traditions will never lead their adherents "astray." So the "astray" thing seems a lot more limited. Am I missing something? Could you elaborate? Thanks, -Smac

Subjective It surely is. I agree with Roger that there is not any particular "uniform list of trans ideological doctrines." The movement is, after all, pretty amorphous. That said, I think most or all of the items in the list I provided would be recognized by most people as widely accepted tenets/axioms amongst trans advocacy groups, trans persons, "allies," and so on. Thanks, -Smac

Huh. Well, here again is my list of "tenets" which are substantiated, most fairly extensively, on various "trans advocacy" websites: I submit that most or all of the "tenets" I listed are widely-shared and acknowledged by "trans" advocates. You apparently disagree, calling almost all of them "hostile anti-trans propaganda." I'm okay with having a difference of opinion here. Huh. Apart from the bolded part (which is a verbatim quote), your link does not seem to say what you say it says. What part of it rebuts Tenet 1? My list was "of claims that function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary 'trans' advocacy." Not sure how you turned that into a list of "requirement{s} for allyship." As for whether statements "resembling" Tenet 2 are out there, here's the Human Rights Campaign: The "tenet" in my list: "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." The HRC website: "When we say women, that word always includes trans women. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it." National Women's Law Center: Happy Pride. Don’t Be a TERF. "It bears repeating: Trans Women Are Women." Are you sure this isn't a widely-held sentiment in the trans community? Are you sure this isn't a fairly fundamental precept in terms of ideology and advocacy and agenda? Huh. So if it's not on the A4TE website, it's not a principle. And yet, just a few hours ago you wrote: In your view, is A4TE the "governing body" that gets to determine what does and does not count to "function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary 'trans' advocacy?" If yes, then you just undermined your own point in the space of a few hours. If no, then whether or not A4TE agrees with a tenet is not really relevant because, to quote a guy: "There is no catechism, governing body, or agreed philosophical system called trans ideology." Sure seems like it. I've seen numerous social media posts/videos where a "trans" person equates denial of their "gender identity" with claiming they don't "exist." Perhaps one of the better known examples: See also here: There it is. Asking questions is "transphobic." Asking questions or expressing skepticism or disagreement = "denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist" and "you’re denying that trans people exist." I think this tenet is rather well-attested. According to you, "There is no catechism, governing body, or agreed philosophical system called trans ideology." I agree But that being the case, whether a tenet appears on A4TE’s allyship requirements doesn't really matter, does it? My list was "of claims that function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary 'trans' advocacy." Not sure how you turned that into a list of "allyship requirements." According to you, "There is no catechism, governing body, or agreed philosophical system called trans ideology." I agree But that being the case, whether a tenet appears on A4TE’s allyship requirements doesn't really matter, does it? My list was "of claims that function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary 'trans' advocacy." Not sure how you turned that into a list of "allyship standard{s}." See above. By your own reckoning, A4TE is not authoritative, so what its website says or doesn't say about "allyship requirements" is not really relevant to my list of "claims that function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary 'trans' advocacy." I don't. Particularly given that most of those "load-bearing principles" are quite well-attested to on other trans advocacy websites. From a previous post: HRC. GLAAD. WPATH. GLSEN. These organizations sure seem to presuppose most or all of the tenets I included in my list. WPATH is perhaps the most noteworthy, since it comes closes to being "authoritative" (it purports to set standards of medical care, was heavily involved in setting public health policy during the Biden Administration, etc.). I thought the list of tenets was relatively and mostly even-handed: I guess reasonable minds can disagree. Thanks, -Smac

I think most people already familiar with Christianity understand that "Elder" in a religious context is an ecclesiastical title, not one denoting age. And since the incongruity of the title to the age of the young man bearing it is both immediate and obvious (and, for some, kind of humorous), there really isn't much by way of a "job" for you to "get straight," wherein you "figure out which definition" is in play. Similarly, when I speak of my step-aunt, Sister Margaret (a Catholic nun), I think most people know that "Sister" is an ecclesiastical title, and not familial. Nothing to "figure out," really. Similarly, when I speak of "Father Mulcahy" on M*A*S*H, I think most people know that is an ecclesiastical title, and not familial. Again, nothing to "figure out." In contrast, "gender identity," "gender expression" and even "gender" by itself have become somewhat difficult and confusing terms, wherein they can genuinely mean different things to different people in different contexts, and in ways that are neither immediate nor apparent. For example, "gender" is sometimes used as a coterminous synonym for "sex," and at other times, as something like "internal sense of themselves" (whatever that means). And that "internal sense" can then be congruent with sex, incongruent, or "intersex" or "nonbinary" or "intergender" or any of the many dozens of potential meanings of "gender identity." So there is where you might have a "job" to "figure out which definition" is being used. And good luck with it. Yes, I think that is totally different. Again, "Elder" has a variety of meanings, some about age, some about status, some about ecclesiastical roles: 3. of or relating to former times; earlier. noun a person who is older or higher in rank than oneself. an aged person. an influential member of a tribe or community, often a chief or ruler; a superior. a presbyter. (in certain Protestant churches) a lay member who is a governing officer, often assisting the pastor in services. Mormon Church. a member of the Melchizedek priesthood. noun any tree or shrub belonging to the genus Sambucus, of the honeysuckle family, having pinnate leaves, clusters of white flowers, and red or black, berrylike fruit. adjective 1. born earlier; senior Compare older 2. (in piquet and similar card games) denoting or relating to the nondealer (the elder hand ), who has certain advantages in the play 3. archaic prior in rank, position, or office of a previous time; former noun an older person; one's senior anthropol a senior member of a tribe who has influence or authority (in certain Protestant Churches) a lay office having teaching, pastoral, or administrative functions another word for presbyter noun Also called: elderberry. any of various caprifoliaceous shrubs or small trees of the genus Sambucus, having clusters of small white flowers and red, purple, or black berry-like fruits any of various unrelated plants, such as box elder and marsh elder So "Elder" can mean an older or higher-ranked person, or a senior member of a tribe, or a Protestant ecclesiastical title, or a Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical title, or a tree, or a shrub, or a berry. When someone sees a 19-year old with a name tag reading "Elder Jones," even if they are not familiar with the Church, they can immediately exclude some of these meanings: Older or higher-ranked person? Nope. Senior member of tribe? Nope. Tree? Nope. Shrub? Nope. Berry? Nope. That leaves "Protestant ecclesiastical title" or "Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical title." The Church's missionaries have been out there for a while, so it's getting harder and harder to suggest that people are not familiar with Latter-day Saint missionaries carrying an ecclesiastical title of "Elder." In contrast, "Gender Identity" is entirely subjective, has many dozens of potential meanings, and those meanings are completely up to the individual. So yes, I think people can readily be less at ease about what "gender identity" means as compared to missionary "Elders." Well, no. I don't "impose" any definition onto the word used as a title for male Latter-day Saint missionaries. It's right there in the dictionary. It's not "imposed." The relevant and applicable definition (the ecclesiastical title: "Mormon Church. a member of the Melchizedek priesthood") is immediately understood, rather than "a person who is older or higher in rank" or a tree or a shrub or a berry. I think you are feigning confusion. I acknowledge the need to understand another person's conceptual framework. Here is a list of definitions/meanings (Healthline.com, so likely not overtly politically partisan) for "Gender Identity and Expression": From Healthline’s “68 Terms That Describe Gender Identity and Expression”: 68 Terms That Describe Gender Identity and Expression And here we go: AFAB — Assigned female at birth; label based on observed sex traits at birth. Agender — Identifies as having no gender. Aliagender — A stated gender outside existing male/female/nonbinary boxes. AMAB — Assigned male at birth. Androgyne — Identity or look mixing or neutralizing masculine and feminine. Aporagender — A specific gender said to be neither man, woman, nor a blend of those. Bigender — Two genders, at once or in turn. Binarism — Treating gender as only two opposite classes. Body dysphoria — Distress about sexed body traits. Boi — Boyish presentation or identity; used in some LGBTQ communities of color. Butch — Masculine presentation or identity, often in lesbian/queer use. Cisgender — Identity matches sex recorded at birth. Cishet — Cisgender and heterosexual. Cisnormativity — Treating alignment of identity and birth sex as the default. Cissexism — Bias against people who are not cisgender. Demiboy — Partly identifies as a boy/man/masculine. Demigender — Partial attachment to a gender (umbrella for demiboy/demigirl). Demigirl — Partly identifies as a girl/woman/feminine. Dyadic — Sex traits that fit typical male or female; not a gender identity. Feminine-of-center — Identity leaning feminine, with or without “woman.” Feminine-presenting — Appearance or manner read as feminine. Femme — Feminine identity or expression. Female-to-male (FTM) — Older term for some trans men / transmasculine people. Gender apathetic — Indifferent to gender labels. Gender binary — The two-class man/woman scheme. Gender dysphoria — Distress from mismatch of identity and sex, or from how others treat the body. Gender expansive — Umbrella for people who reject usual gender norms. Gender expression — How gender is shown (clothes, manner, etc.). Gender identity — Inner sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, etc. Gender-neutral pronouns — Pronouns other than he/she (they, ze/hir, etc.). Gender nonconforming — Expression that breaks stereotypes for one’s sex or perceived sex. Gender normative — Traits that match social expectations. Gender presentation — External display of gender. Gender questioning — Exploring identity or expression. Gender roles — Social scripts attached to men and women. Gender variant — Identity or expression off the social norm. Genderfluid — Identity that shifts over time or context. Gender**** — Presentation meant to break gender rules. Genderqueer — Not exclusively man or woman. Gendervoid — Sense of gender as absent. Graygender — Weak or ambivalent attachment to gender. Intergender — Between or mixing man and woman. Intersex — Sex-development variation; not a gender identity. Masculine-of-center — Identity leaning masculine. Masculine-presenting — Appearance read as masculine. Maverique — A gender claimed as independent of man, woman, or neuter. Misgender — Using sexed language that does not match the requested identity. Male-to-female (MTF) — Older term for some trans women / transfeminine people. Multi-gender — More than one gender identity. Neutrois — Neutral or null gender (overlaps nonbinary/agender). Nonbinary — Umbrella: not exclusively man or woman. Novigender — A gender said to be inexpressible in existing words. Omnigender — Many or all genders. Pangender — All or many genders at once or over time. Polygender — Multiple genders at once or over time. Sex — Classification as male, female, or intersex by biological traits. Sex assigned at birth — The birth record of sex; Healthline treats it as not determining gender. Social dysphoria — Distress from how others perceive one’s gender or body. Soft butch — Milder masculine/butch presentation. Stone butch — Stronger butch presentation (term also has a specific sexual-history use). Third gender — A class neither man nor woman; often tied to particular cultures. Transfeminine — Feminine identity in someone whose birth sex was male. Transgender / trans — Umbrella: identity differs from sex recorded at birth. Transmasculine — Masculine identity in someone whose birth sex was female. Transitioning — Social, legal, or medical steps to present as the identified sex. Transsexual — Older/clinical term; often implies medical change. Trigender — Three genders, at once or in turn. Two-spirit — Some Native North American term for certain sex/gender-variant social roles; not a generic synonym for transgender. As you can see, "gender identity" and "gender expression" can mean very different things to different people in different contexts and at different times. It's rather difficult, then, for an individual to reflexively know "another person's conceptual framework" when the term being used is an amorphous neologism. Thanks, -Smac

I have previously asked, and now ask again: I am quite willing to listen to what you have to say. Which items in the list of "tenets" of trans ideology I previously provided do you feel are inaccurately characterized as such? Which items in the list of "tenets" of trans ideology I previously provided do you feel are not widely accepted by these folks? As for LLMs and political bias, seems like your preferred on - ChatGPT - has its own issues: AI chatbots face major backlash over left-wing bias: ‘Can no longer be considered neutral and cannot be trusted’ In any event, I think all Grok did was compile most of tenets I would have (I have addressed many of this in threads on this board). Good luck departing from those tenets - and publicly saying so - while staying in the good graces of trans advocates, both the groups and the self-appointed online and social media guys. That there is no governing body to definitively establish "tenets" of trans ideology is one thing; to say that no generally-accepted tenets exist at all is, I think, incorrect. Okay. Still hope to see you identify the "tenets" in my list which, in your view, are not fairly characterized and/or are not widely accepted by advocates of "trans" issues/ideology. Your list overlaps with mine only at the edges. Most of it is a different position: liberal courtesy plus “don’t be cruel,” not the set of largely asserted and controverted axioms that I listed and which I see played out all the time (and I documented numerous examples of trans advocacy groups using them). The overlap: Item 1 (the experience is real) and item 2 (ordinary civil protection) are compatible with almost any serious view, including mine. Item 4 (sex and identity are distinguishable) rejects “identity is sex.” Item 5 (policy case by case) rejects “identity wins in every space.” Item 6 (medicine is empirical) is a rejection of my list’s “affirmation is non-negotiable / questions are harm” tenets. So relative to my list of tenets, this "steelman" keeps the humanitarian floor and drops the metaphysical and institutional big ticket claims. Again, I have documented numerous instances of trans advocacy organizations asserting and/or presupposing the tenets in my list. As for reasonableness, 2, 4, 5, and 6 in your list are reasonable as a minimum if “ally” only means “don’t abuse people and don’t pretend biology vanished.” Frankly, I don't think most folks in the "trans" community would accept this minimal commitment, particularly if coupled with a rejection of the tenets in my list. Item 1 is reasonable if “take the experience seriously” means the distress and the self-report exist, not that the self-report is the last word on sex. Again, good luck getting that milquetoast item endorsed by other "trans" allies and such. Item 3 is the hinge. “Usually call her a woman” is courtesy. In practice that courtesy is how “trans women are women” gets treated as the default in every room until someone names a sexed rule. The item tries to wall that off (“does not require believing biology changed”). I think this works as etiquette, but it becomes your tenet #2 the moment "courtesy" is demanded in sports, prisons, medicine, or law. 1 can slide into your tenet #4 if “take it seriously” means “do not contradict the identity claim.” As written, it does not have to. 5 is the honest item—and the one activist frameworks usually will not accept. A person who means 5 is not an “ally” in the HRC/GLAAD sense. They are a liberal who will lose the room the first time they say “not in women’s sports” or "Hey, deep down we all know that 'trans women' are not really women" or "sex is a binary, and is not something that can be changed so that person in one category can 'transition' into the other" or "In the end, I think we need to put *some* parameters on what does and does not count as a 'trans woman.'" In sum, your list is a steelman of a moderate position that I think comes nowhere near being acceptable by most "trans advocacy" organizations and self-appointed "allies." It overlaps with my list of tenets a bit, but also contradicts quite a few. I am quite willing to publicly say whether I think my list is a decent summary of fairly widespread tenets of trans advocacy. I am curious if you will reject any of those tenets. I don't think my list is "maximalist." I think it reflects widely-held tenets, as evidenced by the post in which I documented examples of most of those tenets from "trans advocacy" sources. I never called or characterized the list as a "creed" (this, in your view, is ChatGPT exhibiting apolitical views)? And what's with this "smuggling" stuff. I posted the list for the world to see and invited feedback on it. I didn't say they were "minimum propositions," but rather that they are widely-held propositions, both by trans advocacy organizations and individual "allies." I mean, good luck getting away with going to, say, a "Trans Pride" rally or some such and saying any of the following: Re: Tenet 1 (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): "I am a 'trans' ally. However, I think we need to set aside the notion that a person's 'stated identity' is determinative of whether that person is a man or a woman or neither. Biological sex determines that." Re: Tenet 2 (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. “I am a 'trans' ally. However, deep down we all know that 'trans women' are not really women, but are instead men who have taken cosmetic, medical and sartorial measures to deliberately appear and 'identify' as women. "Trans women are women" only in an entirely figurative/suggestive sense, that's all." Re: Tenet 3 (Self-identification is sufficient). No medical diagnosis, surgery, hormones, or even consistent presentation is required for the identity to be valid. "I am a 'trans' ally. However, there must, in the end, be some sort of barebones criteria to qualify as 'a woman.' Subjective identity is unworkable because it's untestable and unfalsifiable. Those two former NBA players have effectively destroyed the idea that being a "trans woman" can be based solely by self-identification.'" I compliment @california boy and @SeekingUnderstanding for being willing to come to this board and present/endorse a "Steps A-C" proposal which differentiates "trans women" who meet specified criteria (such that they can use women's bathrooms) and those who do not (and so are to be excluded from women's bathrooms). This is a really small venue though. I would be more impressed and surprised if CB presented his proposal in writing and widely disseminated it. See also public declarations denying that "sex is a 'spectrum' and a 'social construct.'" I'm okay with that. I posted the list, and then documented numerous examples of these "tenets" being presented by trans advocacy groups. Candidly, I think "moderate propositions" are there, but they are not nearly as widely-held and endorsed as the list I provided. In other words, the "absolutist" and other extreme tenets seem to be largely assumed and axiomatic in the trans community. Frankly, I am astonished. By your metric I am a trans ally. "Transgender people are real people describing a real experience," I affirm this, with some clarification (along the lines of "but that experience, however strongly felt, cannot override biological reality. A man cannot 'become' a woman by 'identifying as one, nor can anyone migrate from one category in the sexual binary to the other"). "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." I affirm this, with some clarification ("Such 'honest dealing' must include a kind, but still candid and direct, rejection of incongruent-with-reality notions such as 'Trans Women are Women' (they are not women, and acting or pretending to act as if they are is furtherance of falsehood and delusion), 'a "woman" is anyone who identifies as one' (this is a circular and nonsensical definition, as 'woman' means, and has always meant, 'adult human female,' which necessarily excludes men - including 'trans women' - from that definition"), '"sex" is a spectrum' or '"sex" is a social construct' ("sex" is a biological reality, not a subjective identity, not a spectrum, not a social construct)). Thanks, -Smac

I felt the list was fairly accurate. And most of the items on the list were readily available from "trans advocacy" groups. From this post: These advocacy groups lay out the ideological presuppositions, and self-identified "allies" go around enforcing them by, inter alia, vilifying people who do not agree with those presuppositions (hasty and unsubstantiated leaps into "Bigot!" accusations are a good example of this). That said, I am quite willing to listen to what you have to say. Which items in the list of "tenets" of trans ideology I previously provided do you feel are inaccurately characterized as such? I agree that there is not any particular "uniform list of trans ideological doctrines." The movement is, after all, pretty amorphous. That said, I think most or all of the items in the list I provided would be recognized by most people as widely accepted tenets/axioms amongst trans advocacy groups, trans persons, "allies," and so on. But again, I am quite willing to listen to what you have to say. Which items in the list of "tenets" of trans ideology I previously provided do you feel are not widely accepted by these folks? 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. You are redefining, in an manner, "woman" by including men within it. Ideologically-driven, ad hoc redefinition of basic terms is, in my view, a departure from "empirical reality." In my view, when you do this you are fervently refusing to understand their words, their conceptual framework, and the nuances of their point. When I do this I am declining to acquiesce to the radical redefinition of "woman" to include men in its meaning. If I fervently believe that I am the son of Elon Musk, I am factually incorrect about that. I may try to twist and turn to redefine terms or otherwise present some sort of "conceptual framework" and "nuances" to justify my belief, but doing so is a departure form "empirical reality." I am not the son of Elon Musk, and no amount of subjective feeling or equivocation or redefinition or nuance can change that. Again, you have frequently characterized biological men as "women." In my view, the notion that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one is a per se departure from "empirical reality," and no amount of subjective feeling or equivocation or redefinition or nuance, or accusations of "bigotry" can change that. Sure. But to the extent they express the idea that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one, such expressions are a departure from "empirical reality." Uncle Teddy in Arsenic & Old Lace is a long-recognized character, but nobody expects the audience to think he actually is Teddy Roosevelt. "Elder" has a variety of definitions, some pertaining to chronological age and others to ecclesiastical titles: Thus, there is no radical, ad hoc redefinition here. But there sure is one when you affirm that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one. That claim is a departure from "empirical reality." 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." I take the Box point seriously, but I think it is being asked to do work it cannot do. “All models are wrong, but some are useful” is a warning about statistical approximations of complex systems. It is not a license to treat every real classification as optional, which is what you appear to be attempting. Sex is not a subjective, convenient story we tell about bodies. In anisogamous species, including humans, there are two gamete types: small (sperm) and large (ova). That is the empirical binary. Organisms are organized around one or the other pathway. “Not all components align for all people” is true of developmental variation, injury, and medical intervention. It does not create a third gamete, a third reproductive class, or a spectrum of sexes. It describes incomplete, atypical, or medically altered expression within the binary. Your denial of the sexual binary, then, is ideological, not rational, and is therefore a per se departure from "empirical reality." The National Academies language you quote works against you, as it still anchors sex in “biological components… largely related to sexual reproduction.” That is the binary. The hedge about alignment is a recognition of disorders of sex development and of trait mismatch, not a finding that sex is non-binary. A person with CAIS is not a third sex; they are an XY individual whose body cannot use androgens. The classification remains male in the reproductive sense even when the phenotype is atypical. So when I say rejection of the sexual binary is a departure from "empirical reality," I mean this: the binary is not a rough average we can set aside when it is socially inconvenient or ideologically mandated. It is the reproductive architecture of the species. Models can be refined. They do not get to deny the existence of the two gamete classes that define the system. If the claim is only that some traits vary and some people need careful clinical description, we agree. If the claim is that sex itself is therefore not binary, that is the step I cannot take. Usefulness and truth are not opposites here. The binary is both. And because I think it is clear that we disagree, I find your denial/rejection of the sexual binary to be a per se departure from "empirical reality." Right. I acknowledge that. I also note, however, that "assigned at birth" has sometimes been misappropriated by some ideologues to characterize biological sex as something chosen, not observed, and is therefore subjective and/or arbitrary. When these idealogues do this, they use “assigned at birth” to recast sex as a label someone applied, not a trait someone observed. A midwife recording “male” or “female” is almost always naming the reproductive class already present. The "assigned at birth" is used to suggest that the midwife's act - an administrative/clerical annotation - is the origin of sex, such that a later "gender identity" incongruent with biological sex can be framed as the real fact and the natal record as merely a guess that can be corrected. In other words the phrase The work the wording does: move sex from biology to paperwork, then treat disagreement with the new paperwork as denying the person rather than disputing a classification. Such misappropriated usage is, in my view, a departure from "empirical reality." I don’t think it is my job to gate-keep the definition of words and to agree or disagree with definitions. But it is your job to endorse a position that necessarily involves a radical redefinition? If so, you are being selective in what you will and will not do in terms of lexical usage. That selectivity is arbitrary and ad hoc and borne of ideological obligation, and is a departure from "empirical reality." You have affirmed, many many times, that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one. You have repeatedly used and ratified a radical, ad hoc, ideologically-driven redefinition of "woman," which I think constitutes a departure of "empirical reality,." I quite disagree. I think redefinition and equivocation are two of the most potent and frequently-used tools in the "trans advocacy" toolbox. "Assigned at birth." "Sex is a spectrum." "Sex is a social construct." "A woman is anyone who 'identifies' as one." "Trans women are women." And so on. These are factually and linguistically incoherent claims, but anyone who disagrees with them at all is denounced as a "bigot." AFAICS, you have endorsed these terms in ways that are necessarily redefinitional, ad hoc, ideological, equivocating, and obfuscatory, and I find such usage to be a departure from "empirical reality." And that sure is a strange phenomenon. Can "Stefoknee Wolscht," a biological male in his 50s, call himself a perpetual six-year-old girl? Can a 5'9" white guy "identify" as a six-foot-tall Chinese woman? Can Eva Tiamat Medusa "identify" as a dragon? Can Naia Ōkami "identify" as a wolf? The answer to all of these questions is "Subjectively and in their own worldview, yes; otherwise, no. To suggest otherwise would be to depart from 'empirical reality.'" Meanwhile, Is Mr. Wolscht actually a perpetual six-year-old girl? No. Is the 5'9" white guy who "identifies" as a six-foot-tall Chinese woman actually a six-foot-tall Chinese woman? No. Is Eva Tiamat Medusa actually a dragon? No. Is Naia Okami actually a wolf? No. Does society in general go along with the incongruent-with-reality "identities" of these people? No. Nevertheless, there are substantial numbers of people in society who somehow manage to affirm and ratify that notion that although a person cannot become something they are not despite "identifying" as it (a dragon, a wolf, etc.), a man can "become" a sex he is not - a "woman" - by "identifying" as one. I have yet to see a coherent explanation for why claims to an "identity" of a dragon or a wolf are not treated as congruent with reality, but claims by a man to an "identity" of a woman is treated as congruent with reality. At this point, the standard rejoinders I see are "Gender/sex and species/age are different" (never explained, just asserted), or equivocation ("gender identity" is separate from "sex," while elsewhere conflating them (such that "woman" can refer to sex or "gender identity" or both)) or "Bigot!" Wolscht and Medusa and Okami are all claiming "identities" which are incongruent with reality and biological fact. You have repeatedly endorsed claims that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one, which is also incongruent with reality and biological fact. You attempt to overcome or mitigate that incongruency by resorting to ideological and ad hoc equivocatons and redefinitions. I find that to be a departure from "empirical reality." I find the foregoing to be incompatible with your numerous ratifications elsewhere that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one. I think that claim requires its adherents to treat biological sex as "unreal" and "different that what it really is" (that is, malleable, subjective, changeable, on a spectrum and not a binary, etc.). I find that treatment to be unreasoned and factually inaccurate and arbitrary and ad hoc, and therefore a departure from "empirical reality." Okay. Uncle Teddy from Arsenic & Old Lace was not born to Martha Stewart Bulloch Theodore Roosevelt Sr. on October 27, 1858. Uncle Teddy is not really Teddy Roosevelt, and nobody in society believes that he is. Family members and others humor his delusion, but that's about it. But somehow, some segments of our society have found it workable in their minds to go along with an incongruent-with-reality claim that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one. No other "identity" claim (wolf, dragon, whatever) is treated as it is legitimate and real, but this "gender identity" thing is. I find that notion to be incompatible with "empirical reality." I'm not in a position to endorse anything on this. I’m a finance expert, not a doctor. And Ketanji Brown-Jackson could not define "woman" because she's not a doctor either. In truth, she dodged the question because she did not want to answer it. Evasion and equivocation are, sadly, hallmarks of those who want to defend, or not run afoul of, trans ideology. The ideas being presented here, such as there being a "gender identity" component to "female" (such that a male who "identifies" as a woman is female) is ideological and ad hoc and incompatible with "empirical reality." Just because you think something is incoherent doesn't mean it really is. A dictionary definition which folds "male" into the definition of "female" is facially incoherent and a departure from "empirical reality." I quite agree. People with DSDs exist. But we all know that all the talk about "trans" stuff is not about people with DSDs, but rather about people who are unequivocally male but "identify" as a woman, or vice versa. I can accept most of the first half of this paragraph. Chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitals, and secondary traits do not line up the same way in every body. Some of those traits vary in degree. A few people sit far from the typical male or female cluster. That is real, and it is why medicine needs more than a cartoon. The mistake is treating that variation as if it were the definition of sex. “Spectrum” and “bimodal” describe how traits are distributed. Sex names which reproductive class an organism is organized toward: small gametes (male) or large gametes (female). There is no third gamete and no sliding scale between sperm and ova. The two clusters exist because there are two developmental programs. Variation around the clusters does not turn the programs into a continuum or "spectrum" of sexes. A tall woman is not “more male.” A man with low testosterone is not “partly female.” A person with a DSD is not a third sex; they have a developmental difference within one of the two pathways, or a mix of traits that still does not create a new reproductive class. “Not every feature is perfectly binary” is true. “Therefore sex is not binary” does not follow. So I can use the trait language when we are talking about labs, anatomy, or medical care. I will not use it to retire male and female as the only two sexes. The insightful part is that bodies vary. The overreach and departure from "empirical reality" is concluding that the categories themselves are only a rough sketch. Latter-day Saint beliefs are, in the main, not empirically testable. I am quite willing to believe in things that are real, part of "reality," but not empirically so. I cannot prove that my wife loves me, but I believe that love to be as real as anything in my life can be. I can take the thought experiment in good faith, though it takes some real work. In the most de minimis sense, could the First Presidency receive a revelation that George Patton really had experienced 8 prior incarnations prior to his Patton one (e.g., a soldier with Alexander the Great, a soldier fighting Parthians for Rome, a viking, etc.)? "In principle, this could happen, right?" I suppose so, (AoF 1:9 - “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”), but I find it so implausible and farfetched that I have difficulty taking it seriously. So it is with your theoretical. Nevertheless, let's give it a go. I do not doubt that a faithful member can suffer that distress, or that a prophet can receive revelation about a person’s soul (though frankly, I doubt there has ever been a situation remotely like the theoretical one you describe). But I still think the hypothetical smuggles in a conclusion the Church has not taught. The Family Proclamation says gender is an essential characteristic of premortal, mortal, and eternal identity. The Church has since said that in that sentence gender means biological sex at birth. Counseling materials add that our bodies are patterned after the likeness of our spirits. That is the opposite of “the spirit is one sex and the body is the other, and we just failed to notice.” Feelings of incongruence are acknowledged, but they are not treated as evidence that the spirit is female in a male body. The Church takes no official position on the cause of those feelings. It does take a position on what sex is for ordinances, classes, and covenants: the body. So “in principle, a prophet could reveal a female spirit in a male body” is not a small step from present doctrine. It would be a new claim that spirit-sex and body-sex can come apart in an otherwise typical male. Genetic defects and DSDs are real. They are not the same thing as an intact male body plus an inner conviction. Treating every case of dysphoria as a “defective body hiding a female spirit” is the theory being tested, not a premise we already share. Even if I grant the scene—Elder Uchtdorf, a blessing, a statement that this person’s spirit is female—I would still separate three questions: Did God speak comfort to that person? I am not the judge of their prayer. Is that person a woman in the sense the word has in biology, marriage, and the mortal church? No. The body is male. Priesthood, temple, bathrooms, sports, and “daughter of God” in the embodied sense follow the body. Current handbook practice already does. How should I treat them? With the same duty I owe anyone in pain: kindness, no mockery, no demand that they perform a political script. Kindness is not the same as agreeing that they are a woman. If a future prophet actually received and published such a revelation, members would have to weigh it the way we weigh any claimed addition to the order of the Church: with the First Presidency and Twelve, in harmony with what is already revealed, not as a private interview that rewrites the categories for everyone else. I would not pretend a press release from a message board is that process. So my answer to your last two questions is: I would not deny their inner life or their standing before God. I would still say they are a man, and I would still insist that the sex-based parts of church and civic life follow the body. The hypothetical asks me to treat a revelation about a spirit as if it changed the sex of the body. That is the step I cannot take on the doctrine we actually have. Thanks, -Smac

There is no indication he was making an apology for the entire church. I understand that this is an area of emphasis for you. But my question was not whether he "was making an apology for the entire church," but rather whether he was speaking in a representative capacity for the Church when addressing the NAACP. If your position was "No, he was not speaking for the Church," then I would like to better understand your perspective. If Elder Stevenson was not speaking to the NAACP in a representative capacity, are you suggesting that he was speaking in his individual and personal capacity, entirely outside his priesthood office and responsibilities? I think the disavowal is what we have. Reasonable minds can disagree about collective guilt, the utility of public "apologies," and the like. Well, I think some, perhaps many or most, were. I think the early leaders of the Church were not always fastidious in their differentiation between doctrine and opinion/conjecture. In any event, the Church now says that they were theories, and false ones to be repudiated at that. Well, we could consider Joseph Fielding Smith's 1907 statement (though he was church historian at the time) : And then there's John Widtsoe's 1944 statements: The "in some way, unknown to us" language may be pertinent to your inquiry. The August 17, 1949 letter is troubling to me. I think Edward Kimball may have a point: We also have Pres. McKay's private statement to Sterling McMurrin in 1954: And here (same link) : That's what I have so far. Thank you for laying the verses out that carefully. I think we are trying to do the same thing: stay with what the book actually says, and not load it with a theory the text never states. On your three comparisons, I think I agree with the negative claim. The Book of Mormon does not narrate God handing the Lamanites a special garment, painting them, or tattooing them. Genesis does not say Cain put on a coat, painted himself, or was tattooed, and it does not say a mark of that kind passed to a wife’s children. If someone offers garments, paint, or tattoos as the meaning of the Lamanite mark, they are filling a gap. The book never uses those words for what God does in 2 Nephi 5 or Alma 3. Where I would slow down is treating that gap as if it settled the other readings. Alma 3 is doing two different things at once, and you already noticed the seam. The Amlicites “marked themselves” with red on the forehead, “after the manner of the Lamanites” (Alma 3:4, 13). That is voluntary, local, and described as paint or a sign they applied. In the same chapter the narrator also says the Lamanites had a mark “set upon them” because of the fathers’ transgression, so they would not be mixed up with the Nephites, and that whoever mixed with them brought the same mark on their own seed (Alma 3:6–10). That second description is not written as a forehead ritual. It is written as something that follows lineage and covenant standing. The book never bothers to tell us the physics. That is frustrating, but it is the text. What are your thoughts about this? 3 Nephi 2:14–16 is the other passage that will not sit quietly inside a “they painted themselves” reading. Converted Lamanites are numbered with the Nephites, “the curse was taken from them,” and “their skin became white like unto the Nephites.” If the only mark in the book were red paint on the forehead, that sentence is an odd way to say they washed it off. I do not say that forces a modern racial reading. I do say the narrator is talking about more than costume, or else he chose a very strange vocabulary for costume. Cain is not a clean template for this. His mark in Genesis is protection from vengeance. The Book of Mormon’s language is about separation, covenant, and later the lifting of a “curse” when people come to Christ. Mixing those two stories is, I think, an artifact of older and less accurate assessments. My own working stance, which I think is also the most careful one the Church now takes, is narrower than Scripture Central’s suggestions and narrower than a 19th-century racial sermon: The book speaks of a curse and a mark and, in a few verses, of skin. It does not give us a mechanism. Garments, paint, and tattoos are guesses, and reasonably good ones. A biological race theory is also a guess, and also reasonable, and the Church has disavowed the old “dark skin means less favored in the premortal life” folklore. What the book does insist on is that the dividing line is not supposed to be permanent: when people repent, they are received, the curse is spoken of as lifted, and the old hostility is condemned. So I can take your three points as sound warnings against over-reading. I would only ask that we apply the same restraint in the other direction: the text is not a treatise on paint, and 3 Nephi 2 is still sitting there. I am glad to stay in the verses with you rather than in a theory about the verses. To some extent, I think you are correct. One cannot misinterpret what those verses (2 Nephi 5:21, Alma 3:6, and 3 Nephi 2:15) meant in the Book of Mormon. That's the way Joseph Smith supposedly translated by the power of God. The Book of Mormon, possibly even a portion in the Pearl of Great Price, led to the doctrine which would form policy in the LDS Church for centuries. Saints Volume 3, chapter 16 also adds: "David, I am as sympathetic as you are," President Grant had responded, "but until the Lord gives us a revelation regarding that matter, we shall have to maintain the policy of the Church". Beginning in the early 1900s, Church leaders taught that any Saint known to have Black African ancestry, however small, would be restricted". The church leaders used their position and influence to inadvertently lead the members astray. They were sincere, but they were sincerely wrong. Dallin H. Oaks referred to it as "spectacularly wrong". "Lead members astray" = "lead them away from Jesus Christ." I can't agree with that assessment. As Edward Kimball put it: "The {1949} statement went beyond the evidence both in claiming a 'direct commandment' from the Lord and in saying that the doctrine came 'from the days of [the Church’s] organization.'" But again, I respectfully disagree that this amounts to "leading their members astray." It's possible there is no available written record of this supposed revelation. Is it also possible that there was no such revelation? More later. Thanks, -Smac

I concur. I was generally both unaware about and largely indifferent to trans folks until quite a few of them went out of their way to court publicity. Dylan Mulvaney and his Female Minstrelsy and Sexist Caricature schtick has perhaps been the most visible. But then came Lia Thomas. And Lily Tino. And then came the Drag Queen Story Hours. And drag shows for children. And then, I think the worst part: medical interventions on children. Tavistock Clinic. WPATH corruption. HHS corruption. Schools "transing" kids (sometimes without parental awareness or consent). And on and on. Some of this has come to light because people noticed, but I think the bulk of public attention has arisen because notoriety has been actively sought. I'm not sure there's much middle ground to be had. There are too many absolutist demands on the trans side. Too many reflexive attacks on Chesterton's Fence. I think DQSH and drag shows for children are pretty bad. As for "overblown," I dunno. I think Andrew Sullivan nailed it last year: "{A}n unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it." Seems like we've needed to make it a spoken golden rule. I think many women and girls fell this way. I also think there is a not-very-subtle pressure for women and girls to be silent, step aside, let men into women's spaces, and act as if the Emperor's New Clothes are beautiful. I too would like to see statistics done. The Skrmetti decision really does seem to take the wind out of Roger's "Hey, this trans thing is being blown up to be a lot more than it really is" sails. Hugely controversial medical interventions on children are a very important topic, and not because Republicans think so. Look at Europe's 180-turn on such treatments. The Tavistok Clinic. The Cass Report. Republicans don't guide any of this. Men in women's prisons has been a controversy for quite a while, both in the U.S. and the U.K. and elsewhere. I think schools interfering with the rights of parents or deliberately withholding information on their child is a very consequential issue. There are also less consequential, but still important and associated, topics, such as men in women's bathrooms, changing rooms and sports. In the end, I think Sullivan was right. The unspoken Golden Rule, to "leave kids out of it," has long been breached and disregarded. It was the "let's put all sorts of emphasis on trans ideology and children" move (particularly the sexualized/grooming stuff and the questionable medical procedures) that I think has alienated many who otherwise would be more supportive of, or at least indifferent to, trans issues. Thanks, -Smac

Perhaps I have been mistaken. I had understood that you subscribed to most or all of the fundamental tenets of trans ideology. Here's the list I presented previously: My perception of you is that you have affirmed, or would affirm if asked, most or all of the foregoing claims. For example, you have frequently characterized biological men as "women." You have expressed shock that anyone might disagree with this claim, and that such disagreement is "bigotry." In my view, the notion that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one is a per se departure from "empirical reality." I think the same must be said for your rejection of the sexual binary. It is a per se departure from "empirical reality." And your perspective on "assigned at birth" (though your recent comments have clouded my understanding of your perspective on this one). I agree with both of these, except that I think "gender" has sometimes been popularly used as a coterminous synonym for "sex." I think that should be addressed in the definition as a sort of caveat or clarification. It seems like many "trans" advocates equivocate between "sex" and "gender," treating them as synonyms in some circumstances, and as differentiated from each other in others. Are you on board with this definition of "gender?" That it is a "construct" and not a synonym for "sex?" I agree with both of these. Do you? My sense is that much of "trans" advocacy is built on re-defining these terms and their synonyms ("male" and "man," "female" and "woman") to include something along the lines of "and also anyone who identifies as a woman." At least two dictionaries, Cambridge and Merriam-Webster, have incorporated this re-definition into their entries. Here, though, there is no "gender identity" component to "female" (as there is according to Merriam-Webster). Do you endorse that omission? I think this is much better than "assigned at birth," as those phrases have sometimes been used - deliberately, I think - to make biological sex seem like something that is arbitrarily chosen by the doctor, rather than observed. The definition acknowledges, but neither ratifies nor rejects, "the option of 'X.'" Generally, this sounds right. Psychologist John Money famously recommended raising a biologically male infant named Bruce (or "David") Reimer as a girl after a botched circumcision destroyed his penis in 1965. Johns Hopkins University. Money believed that gender identity was entirely learned and shaped by social conditioning rather than biology ("nurture over nature"). He advised the parents to surgically alter the child into a girl, rename "her" Brenda, and raise "her" without revealing "her" biological sex. Though rare, some parents have elected to raise their son as a girl/daughter, or vice versa. "{T}his marker may represent an individual’s sex recorded at birth or gender identity and a designation of 'X.'" No endorsement or rejection of using "M" or "F" or "X" as a designation of "gender identity" (and not sex). I assume these folks are simply reporting how this term is being used, without commenting on its incoherence. These seem good. That link is Chapter 2 of the same 2024 SSA report, “Clinical Conceptions of Sex and Gender,” around the glossary table (pp. 43–45). It is a word list for disability files, not a proof that a man is a woman, or ratification of that concept by the committee. “Not all components align” is the DSD / hormone-treatment hedge. It is true that a CAIS XY person or a post-surgical male will not show every typical male trait. It is not true that sex therefore becomes a menu. Misalignment of some traits is how you describe a disorder or a medical intervention. It is not how you get a third sex or a female male. The committee operationalizes sex as “sex recorded at birth.” That is a paperwork term. It lets the rest of the chapter talk about identity without saying “male” or “female.” Once sex is a line on a form, “updating” the form looks like updating the fact. The fact is still the reproductive anatomy the form was trying to record. If those definitions were along the lines of “trans women are women,” I think the table would define woman as anyone who identifies as one. It does not. It defines sex as reproductive biology and then, separately, an identity that can diverge from that biology. Divergence is only intelligible if the two things are not the same. I think the committee's comment here is worthwhile: I take some small exception to the committee's definition of "Transgender and gender diverse" as being "Umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from what is typically associated with their sex recorded at birth." I think the better definition would have been: "Umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from what is typically associated with their biological sex." Thanks, -Smac

I think you may be right. But then came all sorts of loud and brassy activist groups and social media personalities who have gone out of their way to publicize what they are expecting to see in terms of male access to women's bathrooms (and vice versa). For example, GLAAD has all sorts of verbiage objecting to A) "bathroom bans" (that is, maintaining sex-segregated spaces by biological sex rather), B) "restrict{ions}" on "bathroom access" (that is, restricting men from entering into women's bathrooms), C) "forc{ing}" men (who subjectively "identify" as women) to "use bathrooms and locker rooms that {} match their gender identity" (that is, having men use men's bathrooms), and so on. I think it is disputably going on in some instances. I think this sounds like a straw man fallacy. As if legislating sex-segregated spaces in response to extensive efforts by (mostly) men to enter into women's spaces must either A) be equivalent to "societal order ... breaking down," or B) be not given any attention at all. There's that Straw Man again ("societal order breaking down"). Also the No True Scotsman fallacy. You have asked for examples justifying legislation to regulate sex-segregated spaces. Such examples are legion for anyone with an Internet connection. Per this article, a U.N. study found that "more than 600 biologically female athletes have lost at least 890 medals to transgender competitors." "Trans" inmates (males, as I really doubt there are any "trans women" in male facilities) who have been in women's prisons are being transferred to "jails according to their biological sex, And on and on and on. Straw man and ad hominem. Well, now you know. Straw man. I haven't curated much of anything. I think the Kansas legislature acted reasonably in enacting legislation that ensures that sex-segregated spaces are maintained as such, particularly for women and girls who expect them to be as such. Evidence of men going into women's spaces? Yes. Lots and lots and lots. And the rationale for each cross-pollinate the others. If a "trans woman" is legally entitled to play in women's sports, then ipso facto he should also be legally entitled to enter into women's changing rooms and bathrooms. And the reverse as well. And since folks like you categorically refuse to articulate any limiting principle, sex-segregated spaces are obliterated because "trans" identity can be claimed by anyone at any time for any reason or no reason whatsoever. I'm a lawyer and am not persuaded by proponents of public policy who refuse to address the real-world ramifications of their proposals. So you are "not persuaded by anecdotes" but are nevertheless asking for "some personal anecdotes." I have never been to a sexualized live adult performance in which children have been invited to attend/participate, but I don't think that is a necessary prerequisite for someone to support legislation that prohibits live adult performances from permitting children to attend. I have never been to a Pride parade, but I don't think that is a necessary prerequisite to object to those parades which involve highly sexualized behaviors in public, particularly when children are being exposed to those behaviors, or they are even particularly sought out for the exhibition of those performances. I have never known someone who has engaged in a incestuous relationship. I don't think that is a necessary prerequisite for supporting laws which prohibit sexual behavior relative to consanguinity. I don't know any women who are in prison. I don't think that is a necessary prerequisite for a U.S. citizen to voice an objection to self-selected men gaining entry into women's prisons. And so on. Thanks, -Smac

The Title Page states its purpose is "to show unto the remnant of the house of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations." However, the book also characterizes it as being "an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites," and that it was written "to the Lamanites ... and also to Jew and Gentile" (in other words, the entire world)." It also states that the record was "of revelation—Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord," to eventually "come forth by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof ... by the gift of God." The book therefore characterizes itself as an ancient record that was written, hidden, and much later "{came} forth" and translated, all "by the gift and power of God." Though secondary to the book's status as a "testament" of Jesus Christ, what the book claims for itself necessarily implicates Joseph Smith being a prophet. Yes, opinions vary in a variety of ways. While I think we need some substantial wiggle room as to the particulars, some of these varied opinions seem to be necessarily at odds with the text. "Inspired Fiction" being the most prominent example. I would be interested in learning more about this. What "greater claims" do you have in mind. I am sorry to hear that. I suppose I meant it in juxtaposed to fictitious accounts of man's dealings with Jesus Christ. We don't believe Joseph fabricated the text, but that the text was written long ago and translated by him. It is an abridgment of records of percipient witnesses to important and miraculous events. I'm not sure. My dad passed in January 2025, but my oldest brother may know. I'll check with him. Thank you, -Smac

I think you are correct: we do agree more than we disagree. As for His criteria? I suppose we could look at Matthew 7:21 ("Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."). True. We will each of us be judged individually. And I don't think we need to worry much about what criteria He will be using to judge others, just those He uses to judge us as individuals. Well, that is its primary purpose. I also think it functions as "Exhibit A" in the truth claims of Joseph Smith and the Church itself. If the book is what it claims to be (the "antecedent"), then certain "consequents" follow. Sill a matter of faith, of course. But answering if the Church is what it claims to be is, I think, going to come down to the book as a testament, an authentic testament, of Jesus Christ. We do agree on a lot. I am glad of that. Thanks, -Smac

You don’t seem to care about objections (in the sense of adapting your preferred approach) from any trans advocacy group, I'm not sure why you would say that. I may not agree with much of what "trans advocacy" organizations have to say, but I certainly want to listen and give them their due consideration. In that sense, I do "care." I do see it as a "weakness." CB's proposal contradicts a number of what I think are the basic tenets of "trans" ideology, as well as the advocacy organizations that seek to present and entrench and enforce them in society. To stake out a position based on ideology, and then immediately formulate a proposal that fundamentally undercuts the basic tenets of that ideology, is - in my view - not a very strong position. Thanks, -Smac

But it does when used to create onlys and others. I am still working on understanding your perspective here. John 14:6 - "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." Acts 4:12 - “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” 1 Timothy 2:5 — “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” John 10:9 — “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.” John 10:7–8 — “I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers.” Was Jesus here "creat{ing} onlys and others" in John 14:6? Were His apostles doing that in the other passages? To be sure, given your experience, I can see how a poor sampling of Latter-day Saint culture has treated sacred matters as things to be bragged about or used to disparage others. I am very sorry that happened. I do not think what the Latter-day Saints said to your wife was an accurate representation or reflection or application of the teachings of the Church. Don't all Christians say that "only" Jesus saves? As for "certainty," I think it is more apt to say that "we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). There may be some very few persons who can legitimately claim to have epistemic "certainty" of certain sacred matters. For most of us, though, we believe. We have faith. That faith can, over time, perhaps be tested and strengthened to the extent that a person may claim "certainty" of some things. In contrast, there are some rhetorical conventions in the Church which, while well-intended, are the product more of culture and repetitive experiences than actual, studied faith. Hence when a ten year old girl stands up in Fast & Testimony meeting and says (recites, really) "I'd like to bear my testimony I know this church is true...", I admit I entertain the possibility that this young person has indeed had some fantastic spiritual experience that has removed all doubt, but also the possibility that she has incorporated a stock phrase she has heard several times as a workable formulated expression of faith, and in which "know" means "strongly believe." Anyway, "blind spots." Yes, we all have them. I quite agree with you there. None at all? John 14:6 seems to indicate that those who affirmatively refuse to accept Jesus Christ's atonement will not be the beneficiaries of it. Isn't that a pretty big criterion? Perhaps the most fundamental and almost exclusive one? I too value incertitude, because is gives us the opportunity to thresh our beliefs and differentiate between what we believe in with "certainty" or much potency, and what we believe in as matters for which uncertainty is the byword. Jesus Christ as the Son of God? I strive for certainty on that point. Obedience to the commandments as an expression of faith in Christ? I strive for certainty on that point. Repentance as an essential component of daily life? I strive for certainty on that point. Is the Book of Mormon what is claims to be? I strive for certainty on that point. Was Noah's flood global or local? I don't know. Uncertainty/incertitude governs that question (though I lean to the latter). Was Job a real person or not? Uncertainty/incertitude. Were the conquest of Canaan and the slaughter of the Amalekites divinely mandated as depicted in the OT? Perhaps. Lots of uncertainty/incertitude. Has God ever mandated polygamy? Apparently, but I struggle with it. Uncertainty. Unearned or false certainty likely is. But maybe certainty can happen in some limited respects. "Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13). I don't know. Frankly, I'm not sure it is always incumbent upon us to pursue "certainty" where faith and obedience are sufficient to carry the day. It is a good thought, and one I endorse and share. Thanks, -Smac

This seems to be quite vague and subjective. It can be deployed to describe almost anything. How do we go about quantifying what is and is not "symbolic violence?" For example, when Christians declare that Jesus is the sole source of salvation, do you take that as "symbolic violence" leveled against non-Christians? How do we know when a thing "goes beyond disagreement?" In this context, for example, the Church presents, as a foundational truth claim, that angelic ministers descended from heaven and restored priesthood authority that had previously been lost from the earth. This is a teaching that, while public, is not really publicized. It's an important doctrinal principle, as disagreements over authority have long impeded professed Christian groups and individuals in various ways. It's in our belief system, and it's in our manuals and missionary lessons, but we don't go around and publicly flaunt it or brag about it. If two people separately approach a house, one of them being a police officer with a search warrant for the house (looking for weapons) and the other being a private citizen who keeps tabs on things in the neighborhood, one of them has legal authority to enter into the house, and one of them does not. The civilian genuinely feels cares for the welfare of his neighbors, and that is admirable, but it's not the same as actually having law enforcement authority. I don't think it is "symbolic violence" to say so. That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The Latter-day Saints believe that the "Light of Christ" influences, or can influence, every child of God. We also believe that the Spirit can and does move and influence people of every walk of life. We do have a particularized assessment of the "Gift of the Holy Ghost" as referenced in Acts 2:38 and Acts 10:45. Acts 2:38 associates it with baptism, and so with priesthood authority. We believe such authority is something that must be bestowed by those who have it and under proper authority. And we do invite anyone who wants to join our church to do so through baptism. I struggle to characterize this as "symbolic violence." I am sorry to hear this has happened. "{W}hen we undertake to cover our sins, or to gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man." (D&C 121:37.) I can't formulate a good faith circumstance in which the above behavior is expressed. It ought not to be. Gratifying pride and vain ambitions, methinks. I'm sorry about that. Also worthwhile tools to avert conflict: humility, kindness, circumspection. The Third Convention was a very interesting chapter in the history of the Church: And here: The question of authority is interesting and important. It is not in any way intended to demean or disparage any group or person. Thanks, -Smac

I think it is. You want to eliminate, either de jure or de facto or both, women's spaces by letting anyone into them. That is "something new and radical." I don't know that any of this is "incumbent" on me. This is, after all, just a message board. And your say-so about "zero evidence" is just an assertion. And whether the Kansas law was "needed" is a matter of perspective and preference and policy. This is the kind of statement that makes it hard for me to take you seriously. That biological sex is not observed, and that it is instead voted on or "assigned" by a doctor, is "something new and radical." And probably 99.98% of the time, the doctor correctly identifies the child's biological sex. What the doctor does is not a "judgment call." A judgment call is a subjective decision or choice made using personal opinion and experience because there is no clear rule, fixed formula, or single right answer. The doctor looking at the baby is working off objective criteria (external sex characteristics), not subjective ones. I don't think that is how "assigned at birth" means. I think what is typically meant is this: a doctor (or midwife) looked at the newborn and recorded a sex on the record, and they want that recording treated as a bureaucratic label rather than an observation of the child. I think the gap between us is that you seem to think that what a doctor does is subjective and/or arbitrary (a "judgment call"). I don't think that. If I say "black licorice tastes great," that is a judgment call. This is not akin to what a doctor is doing because a child's biological sex is an objective fact, not a subjective opinion. If I say "California borders on the Pacific Ocean," that is not a "judgment call," and is instead a statement of fact that I am acknowledging. My say-so does not alter the reality of what is being observed. This is akin to what a doctor is doing because a child's biological sex is an objective fact, not a subjective opinion. In very rare circumstances, yes. That means the doctor's declaration of the child's biological sex was factually incorrect. It does not mean that biological sex is subjective or left to the discretion of the doctor to choose. Right. But again, "assigned at birth" is intended to man a doctor (or midwife) looked at the newborn and recorded a sex on the record, and they want that recording treated as a bureaucratic label rather than an observation of the child. I do not think I said this. I have made allowances for the exceedingly small number of persons with DSDs and whose biological sex is insuperably epistemically uncertain. Emily Quinn is, as I understand it, an XY person with complete androgen insensitivity (CAIS). That is a disorder of sex development in a male reproductive pathway. Exceedingly rare exceptions to the rule, yes. Well, no. Your proposal has the exception swallow the rule. My maintains the rule. I don't think males who "identify" as women can rely on an exception/exemption for persons with DSDs as a basis for opening women's bathrooms to everyone. But they are exceedingly rare. And they have no relevance to so-called "trans women" who do not have a DSD. Lia Thomas. Lily Tino. Dylan Mulvaney. Drag Queen Story Hours and drag shows with children in attendance. All very public. All really trying to garner attention. As for "winning issue," I'm not sure what that means. I think men should not be in women's bathrooms, changing rooms, sports or prisons. Publicized incidents in which men have accessed these spaces openly are fairly new. I think "trans" issues have garnered a lot of attention. Outside of the few threads such as this, I think very little about the topic. I do feel that there is much harm coming from this movement, both to adults and children. At its most fundamental level, the movement affirms deluded, incongruent-with-reality notions that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one, that sex is a spectrum and not a binary, that biological sex is "assigned" by a doctor, that expressing suicidal ideation as a basis for obtaining sex trait modification procedures is legitimate, and that anyone who disagrees or questions these assertions, even in communications full of respect, civility and decorum, is a "bigot." I think advocates of trans ideology have done, and continue to do, a lot of harm to a lot of people. Not just those with Gender Dysphoria, but their family members and friends and co-workers who effectively feel coerced into complimenting the Emperor's New Clothes, or else lose their association, be called a "bigot," be accused of trying trans people to suicide ("Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son" is at or near the apex of emotional blackmail and manipulation of parents). Lily Tino and Lia Thomas and Dylan Mulvaney and marchers in parades, and demonstrators/protesters, and so on are all actively courting public attention, and they are getting some. I think this point could have been made without attempting to distract and personalize. You persist in personalizing. I don't watch Fox News. I occasionally come across links to its content, but no more than CNN, MSNow, and so on. Thanks, -Smac ETA: Regarding taking each other seriously (about biological sex being assigned or not), I remembered posting this a while back: The "Letter to the Editor" responses to the above article mostly from medical professionals were . . . pretty frank. Here's an example (emphases added): Another (emphasis added): Another (emphases added): Another (emphases added): Another: Another: Another (emphases added): Much of the foregoing commentary seems to contravene some of the most foundational precepts in popular and trendy narratives about "trans" ideology. And the people speaking here have all sorts of medical credentials after their names. "{T}he alteration of language and the falsified understanding of biological sex, applied to all people, is the result of extreme activism which is increasing societal hostility towards trans people." I see this as what I am observing in many instances: altering language, falsifying understanding of biological sex, and doing these things by way of "extreme activism" or the influence thereof. "Alpert and colleagues report in a BMJ Editorial 5th June 2021 that characteristics of external genitalia at birth are 98% accurate in defining sex at birth. They go on to say that these are ‘flawed constructs’ around sex assigned at birth. Never before have I heard of a test with 98% sensitivity being regarded as a ‘fl[aw]ed construct’." Biological sex is observed, not "assigned." This ought not be controversial, but not only is it, anyone who affirms it is denounced as a "bigot." "It is true that different authors, mainly related to the ideology of gender post-feminism and from philosophical dialectics, have been affirming for years that biological sex is an artificial construction that must be discarded. Nonetheless, it is a serious danger that, on a clinical and healthcare level, a piece of data that is biological is relativized." This. There are people "relativizing" biological sex, portraying it as something subjective and arbitrary, and therefore changeable. "It is false that the sex assigned to a human being at birth is an invention or social construction, devoid of reality. On the contrary, we are facing a verifiable fact, not only by the physiognomy of some genitalia, but also by genetic evidence provided by analytics, etc." Again, this seems to be axiomatic, on par with "water is wet" and "circles are round." And yet here we are, watching people sincerely and with a straight face declare that biological sex is "assigned to a human being at birth." "{C}onsidering the sex assigned at birth as a social construction contradicts the autonomy of the person (based on complete and real information), and also the normalization of trans people. In reality, denying that transgender people have a biological sex at birth is stripping their own requests for gender reassignment of foundations." I think this is correct. "I am baffled by the idea of referring to 'sex assigned at birth'. Sex is an inbuilt biological characteristic, like eye colour, blood group or the number of fingers one has - it is discovered at birth (or, in some cases, prenatally), not 'assigned'. ... Transgender people, like everyone else, deserve to be treated with dignity and respect but this in no way means that downgrading or ignoring sex as a cardinal feature of someone's biology makes any sense." "Assigned at birth." "Sex is a spectrum." "Sex is a social construct." "A woman is anyone who 'identifies' as one." "Trans women are women." And so on. These are factually and linguistically incoherent claims, but anyone who disagrees with them at all is denounced as a "bigot." I have long taken you seriously as a person. I think you are quite smart and articulate and well-educated and well-informed on a variety of issues. Taking you seriously is a rather easy thing to do. The difficulty comes when you stray into areas in which, in my view, ideological capture has caused you to say things that just aren't so. I'm not speaking of differences of opinion or taste or belief. I am, instead, speaking of things that are empirically and obviously true, and which you nevertheless deny. In any event, I do appreciate you sharing your perspective here. Thanks, -Smac

I see your point. However, the percentage of "trans men" in the overall U.S. population is fairly small. Per this article, the number of of "trans men" is about 730,500 people. A still smaller percentage of that number have had "top" surgery. And only a very small percentage of those "pass" in the way that this woman does (she really does like a male). Male adults and teens 15 and over comprise around 137 million persons, 100% of whom would, under Roger's proposal, be free to "come into a {woman's} restroom." By sheer numbers, the difference in policy outcome (legal segregation by sex v. no legal segregation at all), and the concomitant impact on women and girls who want to have sex-segregated spaces, is enormous. We cannot, of course, speak for all women, but I think many of them would prefer to maintain sex-segregated spaces. Roger's proposal eliminates them. The same would be said of the 137 million actual male adults and teens who will, under Roger's proposal, be legally entitled to enter into women's spaces. I wonder how many women and girls would prefer that circumstance. And yet, she's not male. She is a biological woman who has taken cosmetic, medical and sartorial measures to deliberately appear and "identify" as a man. If there is a legally coherent limiting principle that would allow "trans men" to go into women's bathrooms, I sure would like to hear it. Roger categorically refuses to articulate any such principle. It's entirely left to the discretion of the individual. I admire and respect CB for presenting his "Steps (A)-(E)" proposal, but holy cow, it is steeped in "objectionable" points, including from most "trans advocacy" organizations. This is, I think, why people who call for radical societal change keep things nice and broad and vague. They don't want to address the real-world foreseeable ramifications of their proposals or, worse, use silence and obfuscation to smuggle in those ramifications. Meanwhile, all this commentary centers on the impact of sex-segregated spaces on a relatively tiny number of women ("trans men") who have masculinized themselves, and essentially no attention at all is paid to the welfare and preferences of the tens of millions of women and girls who expect sex-segregated spaces to segregate by sex. Thanks, -Smac

I'm not sure what Roger's point here is. What does "conspicuously out of place" mean? And isn't a big part of the problem that this hypothetical fellow is, under Roger's policy proposal (anyone uses any bathroom), legally entitled to enter into the women's bathroom. And because he is there legally, being seemingly "out of place" and "intense{ly} scrutin{ized}" does has no legal force or effect. The women and girls in the bathroom will just have to lump it. Because hallways are not segregated by sex. Because women and girls are not relieving themselves, or undressing themselves, or otherwise having any sort of expectation of privacy from males in a hallway. These seem axiomatic. Right. But under your proposal, they can't do anything about it. They can't tell him to leave. They can't call the police and report him. Instead, they must surrender the space which they were told would be segregated by sex. Men have attacked women in restrooms in the past not because they can walk in unquestioned by others when there are multiple women using it, but because they typically wait until there is one woman alone within. Thus any law barring any biological male from entering a women’s restroom will be highly unlikely to affect these types of attacks, imo. I think they would have some real effect. Under Roger's proposal, if a lone woman enters a bathroom and finds a man there, there is nothing she can do about it. She must do her business with him a few feet away from her. In contrast, under a sex-segregated policy, if a lone women enters a bathroom, she can immediately demand that he leave, and/or call the police, and/or scream, and/or immediately take defensive measures because his mere presence in the bathroom is a violation of the law. She does not need to wait until he manifests ill intent. Thanks, -Smac

A number of these questions seem to be slanted/loaded, and reliant more on strawman caricatures of viewpoints which diverge from yours as compared to straightforward evaluation. Nevertheless, I'll give it a go: Q: What is the purpose of public bathrooms? A: To let people relieve themselves in public with a basic measure of privacy and safety. Where rooms are marked Men and Women, that purpose includes separating the two sexes. The fixtures are not the whole point. The separation is. Q: Which restroom should an individual choose when they need to use one? A: The one that matches their sex. If a single-occupancy, lockable room is available, anyone may use that without asking anyone else to share a communal space with the opposite sex. Q: Do we need a law that mandates which restroom people must use? A: Given recent changes in society, I think we do. We already had a convention, and in many places a rule, that the rooms are sex-separated. When that convention is treated as optional (as your proposal does), institutions need a written line. A law is one way to write it. It is not the only way. The question is still whether sex means something on the door, not whether every detail must be a statute. Q: Do we need a “limiting principle” governing which bathroom people may use? A: Yes, because otherwise there is no mechanism to maintain sex-segregated spaces. Previously, the operative limiting principles were often things less than laws, like social conventions and expectations. But those conventions and expectations are no longer being observed. Lia Thomas was a man competing with women in sports. Lily Tino is a man going into DisneyWorld bathrooms. And these are just high visibility/profile examples. With social conventions/expectations having been substantially disrupted, some jurisdictions feel it appropriate and necessary to resort to other limiting principles, namely, sex-segregated spaces governed by statute, with sex referring to adult human male or adult human female. Discomfort is real, but it is not a principle. Two people can be made uncomfortable by opposite choices. Sex is a public fact. Feeling is not. 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: Yes. That is the foreseeable and anticipated result of your preferred policy. A sex-based rule, on the other hand, with sex as the limiting principle, is the opposite of an any-room rule. Harassment, voyeurism, and exhibitionism should remain crimes. Those crimes are not the only reason the rooms were separated (an important point I think you have never really addressed). Privacy and the ordinary fact of male-pattern strength and crime rates are reasons even when no one is committing a separate offense. Q: Who gets to decide which bathroom will minimize discomfort to themselves and to those around them? A: No one person “decides” the category. Sex is an observed fact, it is something that can be voted on or "assigned." The person who needs the toilet decides when to go. They do not decide what sex they are for purposes of a shared room. 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: If “most appropriate” means “the one that matches how I see myself,” then sex-distinct rooms become courtesy signs. A courtesy sign is not a sex-distinct space. I would rather keep the rooms honest and add more single-occupancy spaces than keep the labels and empty them of meaning. Q: Do you have any evidence that it won’t? A: The old practice was not “choose the room that minimizes your discomfort.” It was “men here, women there,” with rare exceptions handled quietly and with forbearance. What is new is the claim that a male who identifies as a woman is a woman for the purpose of the room. That claim is, historically, very recent. I do not need to accuse anyone of bigotry to say that. People of good will disagree about what kindness requires. Kindness does not require us to say a male is female. 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: I agree that feeling and appearance do not change sex (though given the sarcastic tone, I am not sure if you are saying that you think that looking/feeling "like a woman" does "override the underlying biology"). I also agree that no one historically stood at the door with a chromosome test. That is not the same as saying the room was never for females. We enforce many rules by ordinary recognition — adults and children, disabled parking, the men’s door — without labs and medical testing. When recognition and reality come apart, the honest course is to keep the category and handle the hard cases with single-occupancy rooms, not to redefine the category. Q: But those are extreme cases: exceptionally feminine-looking biological males and exceptionally masculine-looking biological females! A: Unusual appearance is a reason for tact. It is not a reason to treat sex as a costume. A feminine male is still male. A masculine female is still female. Policy written for the rare passing case becomes a general ticket for any male who says he belongs. Q: But what about cases where people suspect, or even know, that someone choosing the women’s restroom is biologically male? A: Those cases are the ones the rule is for. Social pressure does not stop everyone. “He used the toilet and left” is not a complete answer to a girl who did not agree to share that room with a male. Vigilance after the fact is not the same as a rule beforehand. A public restroom is not a sanctuary from every discomfort. It is also not a place where females must accept male presence as the price of being in public. Q: But what about locker rooms! And sports! And prisons! And drag shows! A: These are all interrelated concepts and topics of discussion relative to public policy. They all turn on the same question: does sex still name a class, or does "identity" replace it? Bathrooms are the smallest version of that question. Locker rooms add undress. Sports add fairness and safety. Prisons add captivity. It is fair to take them one at a time. It is not fair to say that because they are distinct in some ways, sex therefore suddenly stops mattering in the room with the toilets. As for exposing children to sexualized adult live performances, I can oppose them and still care about who is in a women’s room. Those concerns do not have to be hostility to a person. They can be a defense of a category and spaces that girls and women have been told are theirs. Thanks, -Smac

A correction….They believe they experience life as a woman. Since they cannot perceive what the inner world of a woman is like and how we in general react to the world, much of what they believe is based on assumptions. Aye, there's the rub. "They believe they experience life as a woman," but they don't actually do that, nor are they actually women. We are living in interesting times when such axiomatic realities not only need to be stated, but are vigorously - and apparently sincerely - rejected and contested. Even if an individual man had some sort of proximate series of events over time, such that he could lay claim to appreciating - if not actually experiencing - things that many women have experienced in relation to being women (time of the month, feelings of vulnerability, etc.), those approximated events would still not transform him from a man into a woman. Norah Vincent went to great lengths to appear/pass as a man for 18 months. She acted like a man, and was generally treated like a man, and had experiences that "men" often have, but none of that actually made her a man. Nor did John Howard Griffin "become" a black man by taking steps to look/pass like one. The sine qua non of being a woman is biology, not feelings, not subjective "identity," not "lived experiences." That is an interesting perspective. For me, the "biological realities" comprises the bulk of the attributes of sex categories, and those biological realities play out in some substantial ways: body and health, reproduction and family, safety, sex-segregated facilities, sports and physical work, identity documents and data, Selective Service, and so on. These are all matters of sex as a class and as a biological reality, not "presentation" or "passing." There are no doubt a variety of circumstances and conditions and experiences that affect a man such that he comes to "identify" as a woman. None of those things, though, matter insofar as they do not and cannot affect biological reality. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Thanks, -Smac

I agree. But I was not speaking of "potential for abuse," but of "spiritual authority as intrinsically oppressive." See here: There is no question (in my mind, at least) that some usages of spiritual authority can be intrinsically oppressive. And I would expand that to some usages of any kind of authority can be intrinsically oppressive. A police officer's legal authority to arrest someone is not "intrinsically" oppressive, but it is capable of becoming so based on the circumstances. Effectively all human relationships "have the intrinsic capacity to be abusive." But spiritual authority having the capacity to be "oppressive" is, in my view, distinct from being "intrinsically" oppressive altogether. Sounds like we agree on this point. And in mine as well. There is only one perfect person who has ever walked the earth. The rest of us can and do make mistakes. Could you elaborate here? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "violence." By this formulation any doctrinal disagreement between Party A and Party B is "violence." Without more, doctrinal disagreement is not "violence," it's just disagreement. I'm not sure I see the symmetry here. "Latter-day Saints do not believe in priesthood authority outside of that administered in their faith" is a qualitatively different statement from "Latter-day Saints do not believe in the 'Jesus' described in the New Testament of the Bible." The former is a true characterization of and statement about our faith, the latter is factually incorrect and and unfair and inaccurate characterization. Still not sure what "symbolic violence" means. As a Latter-day Saint, I anticipate Christians in other faith traditions will disagree and/or deny that John the Baptist and Peter, James and John descended from heaven and restored the priesthood to and through Joseph Smith. I don't see that as "violence," symbolic or otherwise. It's just disagreement. For me and my lawyer brain, "violence" has specific reference to the use of physical force. However, I can see how "violence" can be legitimately used in purely metaphorical ways. They help. Thanks. -Smac