SCOTUS Decision: Ban on "Talk" Conversion Therapy is Unconstitutional

[smac97]

48 minutes ago, MustardSeed said:

I’ll make the conversation complicated- there’s a case in WA where a Japanese bathhouse was sued for not allowing a trans woman in.  The rule had become you have to have a vagina to participate in the naked activities.  (Surgically or biologically no matter).  The bathhouse lost the suit and now it has gone to federal court.
it is important to me to be considerate of trans people and to treat them like human beings and to be Christlike and all the things. But I do not want a penis exposed to me ever under any circumstance unless I married it or it’s under the age of 3 and there’s dressing involved. 
https://komonews.com/news/local/women-only-spa-takes-fight-over-transgender-access-to-supreme-court-olympus-spa-lynnwood-tacoma-pierce-county-transgender-woman-identity-korean-body-scrubs

From the article:

Quote

At issue is transgender access, specifically transgender women at Olympus Spa, which offers traditional Korean body scrubs, open soaking pools and steam rooms in Lynnwood and Tacoma.

The case stems from a battle that began more than six years ago, when a transgender woman said she was denied access to the spa.

Olympus Spa had a longstanding policy that transgender women are welcome, but not if they are preoperative or have male anatomy.
...

Lead attorney John Bursch said the petition asks the Supreme Court to review the case on behalf of Olympus Spa and uphold the policy.

"We're asking the Supreme Court to review this case on behalf of the Olympus Spa and to hold that a spa that has an all-nude female clientele does not have to allow a male into its nude sauna area simply because he identifies as a woman," Bursch said.

Bursch, with Alliance Defending Freedom, along with lawyers with the Pacific Justice Institute, is asking the high court to hear the case after Olympus Spa appealed an earlier decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it was upheld.

The transgender woman at the center of the case declined to be interviewed for the story. She reportedly called the spa in January 2020 to ask whether she would be admitted and said she was told that transgender women who had not undergone surgery would not be admitted, meaning she would be denied entry.

She filed a complaint with the Washington Human Rights Commission, which ruled that a transgender woman cannot be excluded from women's facilities merely because she is preoperative or has male anatomy. In her complaint, she alleged she was told that "...TRANSGENDER WOMEN WITHOUT SURGERY ARE NOT WELCOME BECAUSE IT COULD MAKE OTHER CUSTOMERS AND STAFF UNCOMFORTABLE..."

Bursch said the spa's policy is not based on identity.

"The whole policy, the entry policy that the spa has, is not based on anyone's identity or their gender expression or their feelings. It's based only on anatomy," Bursch said during a virtual Zoom interview.

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

Is this a valid "limiting principle"?  If not, why not?  If yes, then what do we make of, for example, Lia Thomas?

I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this.

@Analytics, this is one of any number of examples as to why "limiting principles" can be important and necessary.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 12 hours ago by smac97

[MustardSeed]

8 minutes ago, smac97 said:

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

To be clear, in my opinion, a trans woman is not a woman a trans woman is a trans woman.  
 

Additionally, I don’t know that the case has anything to do with the establishment or anyone referring to trans women as “women” . The case is as far as I know is purely an issue around whether or not penises are allowed in this private bathhouse offered to women.  
 

 

[smac97]

1 hour ago, MustardSeed said:

To be clear, in my opinion, a trans woman is not a woman a trans woman is a trans woman.  

Thank you for your input.  Could you clarify?  What distinction do you see between "a woman" and "a trans woman"?

If you'd prefer to not clarify, that's fine.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Analytics]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

From the article:

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

No. Don’t misrepresent the article. From the article, self-identity plus surgical transition = "welcome to use the facility."

I still see no reason for there to be a universal limiting principle. Do you think there needs to be a federal law that says that Olympus Spa should be criminally prosecuted or shut down for allowing people who, according to your so-called “limiting principle” are really men?

Rather than having a “limiting principle”, why can’t we just have a social contract where:

1. If you are transexual, don’t try to make waves about (e.g. don’t wave your penis around in places where people don’t expect to see penises, don’t participate in competitive sport leagues where your physiology gives you an unfair advantage)
2. If you are a venue, make common-sense accommodations based upon the individual circumstances
3. Show everybody some grace

Why isn’t that approach sufficient?

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

Is this a valid "limiting principle"?  If not, why not?

Let's be honest. The only reason we are having this conversation is because some politicians have decided this is a useful issue. 

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

If yes, then what do we make of, for example, Lia Thomas?

According to current NCAA policies:

Quote

The participation policy for transgender student-athletes adopted by the Board of Governors and effective February 6, 2025, does not permit competition by an individual assigned male at birth to compete on a women’s team. The policy is clear that there are no waivers available, and students assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team with amended birth certificates or other forms of ID. Student-athletes assigned male at birth may not receive athletic scholarships that are otherwise designated for women. If competition occurs, the team will be considered a mixed team and not eligible to compete against women’s teams. This also applies to a student-athlete assigned male at birth competing as an individual against women. Such individual competition is not permitted under the policy. Any previous policies that permitted mixed team competition against a women’s team are rendered moot and not applicable as the BOG policy adopted in February 2025 supersedes all previous policies.

Are you okay with that policy? Or do you think the policy needs to be updated with a “delimiting principle” that defines what a woman is, and then determine eligibility for competing based on that definition? 

For the record, I have no problem with the NCAA's policy. If you are transgender and want to swim, then swim with the boys. Or don’t swim. That is a reasonable compromise that the stakeholders can make.

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this.

@Analytics, this is one of any number of examples as to why "limiting principles" can be important and necessary.

What do you think of the new Kansas law? From today’s New York Times:

Quote

On Feb. 25, Siobhan Kirchstein received an official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles instructing her to surrender her driver’s license. She was one of hundreds of Kansans who received such letters when Senate Bill 244, a hastily passed piece of legislation, invalidated driver’s licenses on which the gender marker did not match the holder’s sex as assigned at birth.

“Additionally, please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials,” the letter said. “This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately.” The law was going into effect the next day.

Kirchstein, who is 41, had transitioned in 2023. She had changed her legal name and her gender marker in the Social Security system, on her passport card and on her Kansas driver’s license. It required jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops — the name change alone required a court hearing and proof that Kirchstein had notified her bank, credit card company, landlord and others — but it was worth it, to make it official.

Now she considered disobeying the instruction from the Division of Vehicles. She went down some internet rabbit holes to figure out what the consequences might be. It appeared that if she was caught driving with an invalid license, she would be fined and sent to jail for five days; if caught doing it more than twice, she would face three months in jail. She’d heard that Kansas might be placing transgender women in men’s prisons, and she feared violence, even rape. So, while some friends wondered aloud whether the state was really going to enforce the new law, Kirchstein decided to comply.

Afraid of getting pulled over, she asked a friend to drive her the next day. At the Division of Vehicles, located in a mall across from a Burger King and next to the Kaw Valley Bridge Club, she handed a clerk the letter she had received. Without looking at her, the clerk made a notation and sent Kirchstein to wait to be called. The next staff person didn’t look at her either — just took her paperwork and, a few minutes later, handed her a temporary paper license with the “M” gender marker. Kirchstein started crying. As she walked toward the exit, she thought that she could see it in the faces of many of the people standing in line: They’d gotten the letter, too.

“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you,” the letter said.

Some of the words or expressions in this article may at first blush seem hyperbolic. One of them is “fascism.” That’s how Kirschstein characterized the process when we met in Lawrence in July: “It was soft fascism.” It was. Fascism usually begins with redefining the nation by excluding certain groups, which are branded threats to national health and unity. The Trump administration has fixated on two groups most of all — immigrants and trans people — in just this way, smearing us (I am a member of both groups) as predatory, sick, at once subhuman and terrifyingly powerful. Even before Donald Trump was elected for the second time, more than half the states had considered or passed legislation limiting the rights of trans people. The process has intensified in the last year and a half, and the law enacted in Kansas in February is one of the most restrictive pieces of anti-trans legislation passed in any state so far.

The law, Senate Bill 244, redefined “gender” to mean “biological sex at birth” and directed state agencies to revoke and reissue driver’s licenses and birth certificates that had previously been changed to align with people’s identities. It also directed all government and public buildings to designate “multiple-occupancy private spaces” — bathrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms — as reserved for one sex. Like the infamous 2021 Texas law that enabled ordinary people to sue any person perceived as helping someone get an abortion, S.B. 244 created a bounty system, allowing people in Kansas to sue, for “actual damages or liquidated damages in the amount of $1,000, as well as declaratory and injunctive relief,” anyone they suspected of violating the bathroom provision.

With the possible exception of Lawrence (and even Lawrence is a stretch), Kansas is a place where a person cannot survive without a car — can’t go to work, can’t shop for groceries, never mind see friends or go to a movie. And let’s talk about the bathrooms. All trans people are accustomed to some level of stress when it comes to bathrooms. Take me, a person fortunate enough to live in a blue state and work in a supportive environment. I prefer not to use the men’s room at work lest my presence discomfit male colleagues who know that I was assigned female at birth, and I prefer not to use the women’s room lest my presence discomfit women who don’t know me and would perceive me as male. The New York Times building has many single-occupancy bathrooms designated as “gender-neutral.” They are on different floors than the one where I work, and on a couple of occasions, during high-traffic times in the building, I’ve been late for a meeting because I was stuck waiting for an elevator. That is a minor inconvenience.

Now take a trans person in Kansas. Matthew Neumann, the executive director (and until recently the sole employee) of the L.G.B.T.Q. Foundation of Kansas, told me that his organization had heard from one trans man who was fired for leaving the state building where he worked to use the bathroom in another building. Another trans man, who switched to using the women’s bathroom pre-emptively, explains the law to anyone he encounters there, lest that person be startled by his presence. Imagine having to come out to strangers this way every time you have to pee. Alternatively, imagine being unable to use a bathroom outside your home. Then imagine having to choose between not driving, because your license is invalid, and outing yourself as trans every time you enter a club, buy an alcoholic beverage, go to a building where security personnel check ID (an office building, your kid’s school), vote (Kansas is one of 10 states that require so-called strict photo ID to vote), rent a car, check into a hotel or are stopped for a traffic violation.

Which brings me back to the word “fascism.” In 1938, Nazi Germany passed a law requiring Jews to add a specific middle name to their identity documents — Israel for men, Sara for women — so that they could be easily identifiable. “It would be laughable, if one couldn’t lose one’s reason over it,” the German Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary at the time.

“I got the hint. I left.” I met Olivia Perdue at a roadside Panera Bread not far from her home in Missouri, where she had moved a week earlier. Perdue laid a half-dozen laminated ID cards on the greasy glossy table in front of us. “The V.A. thinks I’m female, the F.A.A. thinks I’m female, the Social Security Administration thinks I’m female, the state of Missouri thinks I’m male.”

A study by the Williams Institute found that about 21 percent of trans Americans have served in the armed forces, more than double the national average. In Perdue’s age group, the percentage may be even higher. She signed up for the Army right out of college, in 2016, soon after President Barack Obama’s administration announced a new policy allowing transgender troops to serve openly and to get gender-affirming care. She was out to all her friends but had not transitioned medically. The recruiter advised enlisting as a man and coming out once she was already in the service. The military had guidelines, an established process for transitioning troops, and this process could require one to stay in one place for a year or more. Perdue decided to wait until after basic training, then until after officer school, then until after her first deployment — and then it was March 2019, she was in the woods in Poland, scrolling through Reddit, and she learned that the Pentagon was going to make good on President Trump’s 2017 promise to ban trans troops.

Lieutenant Perdue had less than a month before the new policy went into effect. She got her official diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” just two days before the deadline. She started hormones in March 2021. But, she told me, “I’d seen the writing on the wall.” Yes, Joe Biden was by then president and things might change again (they did), but then they could change right back (they have). Perdue decided to get out of the military while she was still young enough to start a civilian career.

She moved to Manhattan, Kan., and enrolled in Kansas State University’s aviation program. In February 2025 she received her certification as a flight instructor. But she had not considered that flight instruction is, as she puts it, a “very public-facing job.” Perdue’s résumé gets her a lot of first interviews. She has traveled all over the country for them. And she has learned to recognize a look. “Their eyes kind of dim once they realize you are a trans person,” she said. They seem to think that their customers will not want to learn flying from a trans woman who doesn’t particularly try to pass — and at 6-foot-4, probably couldn’t. The one job she was offered, in New Jersey, paid so little that she couldn’t afford to take it.

Perdue changed her name and the gender marker on all her documents in 2022. In 2023, the Kansas Legislature passed Senate Bill 180, which backers called the “women’s bill of rights.” It defined sex as biological and binary and decreed that “‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova, and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” (It was, in other words, an earlier version of an executive order Trump signed on the first day of his second term in office; that was titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”) The Democratic governor of Kansas, Laura Kelly, vetoed the bill. The Legislature overrode the veto.

Perdue didn’t think the new law would affect her — it seemed like a symbolic pronouncement. Then the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach, a longtime Trump ally, sued to bar state agencies from allowing the use of gender markers different from the sex people were assigned at birth. He claimed that he was trying to enforce S.B. 180. A court temporarily granted his request. Perdue, meanwhile, moved into a new house and excitedly sent away for a driver’s license with the new address. The license came back with the gender marker “M.”

In 2025, a state appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision. Perdue went back to the Division of Vehicles and got a license with the marker “F,” as on all her other ID cards. Less than a year later, the Legislature passed S.B. 244. Perdue got what trans Kansans refer to as the Letter — the same one Kirchstein got, informing her that her driver’s license would expire by the end of the day. It was 2:30 in the afternoon when she took the envelope out of her mailbox. She thought it was lucky that she had the day off — she got her new/old driver’s license with the “M” marker before close of business.

All this back-and-forth with the gender marker was absurd, and this is how Perdue experienced it: as ridiculous more than threatening. She had been living openly and happily in small-town Kansas for five years, and she didn’t see that changing. But she was also going through a divorce (Perdue married when she was 22, the same year she joined the military), which required going to court.

She pulled up a photo on her phone. It showed a bathroom door in the courthouse, painted institutional yellow. A printed notice attached with blue masking tape summarized the bathroom provisions of S.B. 244 and warned: “Any violation of this law may subject the individual to civil and criminal penalties.” It no longer seemed so ridiculous.

Perdue moved in with her boyfriend, a trans man, in Missouri, but both of them realize that this is probably only a temporary solution. “The problem is that Kansas is kind of a test case,” she told me. “It shows what’s possible.” Missouri, where Republicans hold both houses of the legislature and the Statehouse, had considered its own driver’s license and bathroom bills. The couple have been talking about moving to Chicago. In the meantime, Perdue is working as a caregiver and studying to be an airplane mechanic, a less public position in which she hopes she will be more employable.

Some days are happy. On July 7, I went to the Douglas County courthouse in Lawrence to attend a name-change hearing. The petitioner was a 36-year-old trans woman whose last name was Baney and whose legal first name, which she wanted to change, sounded like a parody of a macho all-American name. She was very nervous. She had been in a courtroom only once before, for a custody hearing, and that hadn’t gone well: She gets her 7-year-old daughter only every other weekend.

The judge, Mark Simpson, had a kind voice. He asked a series of yes-or-no questions, establishing that Baney was a resident of Kansas and had given proper notice of her name change. Baney, wearing a flowy white and blue dress, fidgeted behind the podium. The judge signed her petition and said, “Congratulations. Congratulations, Tracy!”

Later Baney emailed me about that “Congratulations, Tracy!” line: “That was so amazing I hope I never forget it.” As we left the courthouse, she exclaimed excitedly, “My mother is going to hate this!”

Baney, who grew up with her mother in Nebraska, was around 13 when she was caught in the girls’ locker room trying on someone’s clothes. Things at home got tense enough that she ended up moving to Kansas to live with her father, a Trump-voting, immigrant-hating, gun-toting man, and he became the center of her world. She enlisted and, as a gift from her father, got a large tattoo of a bald eagle wrapped in an American flag with dog tags around its neck; the low-cut dress she wore to her name-change hearing exposed most of it. After her father died four years ago, Baney started therapy, began identifying as trans and bisexual, and began her medical transition. Now she says she is the happiest she has been in her adult life. She has found a community in Lawrence. She has a boyfriend who works as a custodian at the same large manufacturing plant where she works in maintenance; they take lunch together. It’s hard to square that happiness — and that name-change hearing — with the new anti-trans law and the fear it has generated. “I have whiplash,” she told me.

I had whiplash, too. It’s as if there are two Kansases — a kind, loving Kansas where neighbors accept one another and churches offer sanctuary to immigrants and create summer camps for queer kids. I visited such a summer camp outside of Wichita on the first day of its weeklong session. Ninety-seven middle schoolers and high schoolers, with hair every shade of the rainbow and more sartorial finery than one might see at a prom, had been delivered to Camp Sunflower by their parents, who placed their progeny’s duffel bags in the designated pile and handed over their medication bottles and prescriptions to the designated staff members. Amanda Mogoi, a straight married mother of three who runs a Wichita clinic that provides care to some 4,000 trans people, was on hand to set up the orderly distribution of whatever antidepressants, A.D.H.D. medication or hormones the campers had been prescribed.

Mogoi’s clinic has a decorative fish tank filled with figurines of queer mermaids, and every room features a mural of a queer hero: Elliot Page, Harvey Milk, Jonathan Van Ness — and the Obamas. When S.B. 244 passed, Mogoi hastily organized a wedding in the clinic’s lobby: One of the nurse practitioners was engaged to a trans man, and they wanted to get married in time to avoid his being marked as “F” on the marriage license. Now Mogoi is running for an open seat in the Kansas Legislature. Her slogan is “Midwest kindness, real solutions.”

And then there is Kris Kobach’s Kansas. Kobach’s website boasts that he brought the first case against the Obama administration over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seeking broader powers to detain and deport. He sued the Biden administration repeatedly and challenged vaccine mandates in court. Kobach served as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, and in that time he instituted some of the strictest voter ID regulations in the country. During the first Trump administration, he served as vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, an early institutional effort to sow doubt about the integrity of our elections. As attorney general, he has pursued a policy agenda as closely aligned with Trump’s as any in the country. Anti-trans legislation has been a centerpiece.

“I knew it was coming because they do something like this every year,” Abi Boatman, a state representative, told me. Boatman was appointed to fill a vacant seat at the beginning of the 2026 legislative session. She is the only out trans person in the Legislature, and only the second trans legislator in Kansas history. The court ruling that blocked Kobach’s early effort to prevent Kansans from changing their gender markers had come down after the previous legislative session ended. Now Republican state legislators used a maneuver known as gut and go, when the text of a pending bill is entirely replaced by something unrelated. The original S.B. 244 had concerned bail bonds; the Republican state representatives stripped that language out and replaced it with a set of anti-trans provisions, allowing legislators to drastically shorten public comment and testimony, leaving open, among others, the question of how schools and other public buildings should cover the expense of reconfiguring their facilities in the manner the law required. “I’m not saying that transgender rights is not a divisive issue,” Boatman told me. “I’m saying most Kansans don’t want to spend millions of dollars to fix bathrooms that don’t need to be fixed.”

I asked Boatman how she was managing after the law was enacted. The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka is a grand 19th-century building whose ornate frescoes, murals and exhibits attract droves of tourists daily. It’s also a public building that is subject to the bathroom provisions of S.B. 244. “I have my separate but equal bathroom,” Boatman said — the Capitol’s one single-occupancy bathroom, which doubles as a lactation room. (“So now you are pitting a breastfeeding woman against a trans woman,” Boatman told me ruefully.) One time there was a call of the House, a parliamentary procedure used to create a quorum. Boatman didn’t hear the call because she was on a different floor, awaiting her turn in the bathroom. Later, a fellow legislator called her out for having been absent. “I was using the only bathroom this Legislature has said I can use,” she said.

The State Capitol is one of a few major tourist attractions in Topeka. Another is the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for spewing hate against gays, trans people, Jews, soldiers and many other groups, and for winning a 2011 Supreme Court case that secured its right to do so in audacious ways. The church displays hate messages in rotation on a giant marquee. (I won’t quote them, but if you hover over this phrase, you’ll see the URL the church uses.) Two houses stand across the street from the church, one painted the rainbow colors of the L.G.B.T.Q. flag, the other pink, white and blue, the colors of the trans flag. Two visions of Kansas, silently facing off day after day.

Another tourist attraction in Topeka, less than 10 minutes’ drive from Boatman’s “separate but equal” bathroom, is the building that once housed Monroe Elementary, the school at the center of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The building is now a museum managed by the National Park Service. It’s a good place to learn about the long history of Kansas choosing what kind of state it wanted to be. In the 19th century, Kansas heeded the abolitionist John Brown’s call to join the union as a free state. After the Civil War, the Black population of the state grew and grew, but it took a decision of the Supreme Court to end segregation in Kansas. For the purposes of this article, it seems important to note that the winning argument in Brown v. Board of Education was likely to have been conceived in 1944 by Pauli Murray, then a Howard University law student who would go on to become a leading civil rights attorney and also a person who repeatedly sought and was denied gender-affirming care.

Charles, who asked me to use only his first name, lives in one of those places in Kansas where the nearest post office is a couple of towns over and the nearest town is a ghost town. Geographically speaking, most of Kansas fits this description. Charles grew up here. He lived out on the West Coast for eight years — this was after he left the evangelical church in which he was raised — but 18 years ago he returned to Kansas for “family, chosen family, price of land, warm weather, thunderstorms, the night sky, the tallgrass prairie, wide horizons,” as he told me. “The family (relatives) bit of that didn’t turn out so well,” he added later in a text message, “but I still love the rest of it.” He and his mother have barely spoken since he came out to her as trans in 2023 — four years after he actually started his transition. But his next-door neighbor, who is also his boss at the cattle ranch where he has worked for most of the last dozen years, is supportive, as are friends.

The night before Charles went in to change his driver’s license, he couldn’t sleep. He got up and gave himself an extra-short haircut. In the morning he put on a T-shirt that accentuated his cattle-rancher muscles. A friend drove him the roughly 30 miles to Emporia, where the Division of Vehicles shares a mostly deserted mall with a dialysis center. When it came time to take his picture, Charles scowled as best he could, to underscore the absurdity of his face appearing on a driver’s license with an “F” gender marker.

Now he regrets changing the license. Charles had assumed that he would get the Letter, because when he renewed his license in January, a clerk told him that his license had been “flagged,” and Charles figured it was because he’d changed his gender marker back in 2022. So when the Legislature overrode the governor’s veto, he texted his boss, alerting him that he might not have a valid driver’s license the next day. The boss told him to stay on the clock while he took care of the paperwork, the boss’s small way of trying to make things better. But then days passed, and the Letter never came, and Charles wonders if it ever would have.

Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws. Only about 1,700 people have received the Letter; this is certainly only a fraction of Kansans who have changed their gender marker. Several people who have not yet received it — including Abi Boatman, the legislator — told me that they regularly checked the state website to see if their old license still came up as valid. If so, is it safe to drive with it? The license is still illegal under the law. Amanda Mogoi, who runs the clinic in Wichita, told me that some of her trans patients have received the Letter three times while most haven’t received it once; some who tried to update their driver’s licenses without the Letter weren’t able to.

On May 5, Kris Ripper, a trans woman, was stopped while driving home from work for failing to turn on her headlights in the rain. The police officer repeatedly asked her why her license indicated that she was male; she explained that the law required it. Almost two months later she found out that she had been charged with a misdemeanor for driving without a valid license. (Ripper talked to another trans reporter about her predicament, but declined to speak with me.) The charge was eventually dropped, but not before she was threatened with a $1,000 fine and jail time.

In the 1930s, a German Jewish jurist named Ernst Fraenkel developed a model he called the dual state. It is a state in which some people are subjected to increasingly restrictive laws that are applied arbitrarily while others continue to live in a regular, rules-based society. Fraenkel referred to the former as the prerogative state — a state whose defining characteristic is the authorities’ exercise of their prerogatives — and the latter the normative state. Fraenkel’s theory has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the United States during Trump’s second term, probably because it helps many Americans square their understanding of a rising autocracy with their subjective experience of daily life continuing as before. In Nazi Germany, the prerogative state was small: It encompassed some 600,000 Jews and even smaller numbers of Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, members of the Communist Party and the physically and mentally disabled. In the United States, Black people, Indigenous people and many immigrants, at a minimum, have long — have always — experienced state power as arbitrary and violent. That’s a much larger group. But even so, when the prerogative state expands, it shocks us: When a white U.S. citizen is shot by an immigration agent, or when a white person in Kansas wakes up to find out that they no longer have a valid ID — in a sense, to find that they are now undocumented in their own country.

When S.B. 244 passed, Amanda Mogoi started giving her patients letters to carry around attesting to their gender-affirming treatment, and including her nursing license number and contact information. She learned this approach from her husband, a Kenyan immigrant. Even though he has legally lived in the United States for two decades, until recently, he carried what Mogoi describes as a giant accordion folder in his car, containing his immigration papers, his nurse-practitioner diploma, their marriage license, photographs of their family and more. It came in handy, Mogoi said, when he was “sundowned out of a town” where he had gone to see a patient. She added, “I’m afraid that’s where we are headed with our trans folks.”

It was striking to hear Mogoi make that comparison. But this is part of the dual-state effect: the shocking realization that you can suddenly be thrown into the category of people who can’t drive down a country road without risking running afoul of the rules. And once you are in that category, you can’t hide. Charles, for example, lives 25 miles from where he grew up. People here have known him since childhood. Many have been either supportive or quietly accepting of his transition. But that was before the Kansas attorney general and the U.S. president declared war on trans people. “It worries me sometimes,” Charles said. “It’s a rural area. And everybody’s got guns.”

“This is a state-created refugee crisis,” said Samantha Boucher, a political organizer based in Denver. Boucher used to work in disaster relief. “You know how some trans people overcompensate?” she asked me by way of explaining why, before transitioning, she had done the manliest of jobs in the scariest of situations. When S.B. 244 passed, she called a friend, a straight cis man she’d worked with on several disaster deployments, and together they started a rescue effort she named Operation Lifeboat. There is no public database of people in Kansas who are trans or who opted to change their gender markers, but it’s possible to use publicly available information to find people who have legally changed their first names. Using this and other creative sleuthing, Operation Lifeboat did a text blast to roughly 30,000 people who were likely to be trans or friends of the trans community, and several hundred responded to ask Operation Lifeboat for help.

I have written about many displaced people in different parts of the world. One thing I’ve learned is that the people who leave first are usually those who have resources, those who have connections elsewhere, those who have traveled. Generally speaking, these are not the people who are hit hardest by whatever disaster they are escaping. In Kansas, for example, it’s the working-class people who have jobs that require a driver’s license, the people whose bathroom breaks are timed, the people who can’t afford to pay a fine if they are issued a citation who are likely to feel the effects of S.B. 244 most acutely. “The people who call us are usually flat broke and desperate,” said Keira Richards, who is also based in Colorado and runs another organization for displaced trans people, the Trans Continental Pipeline. In November 2023, during an event for Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of victims of anti-trans violence, Richards and her friends noticed a lot of new arrivals. That year, state legislatures across the country considered a record-breaking 615 anti-trans laws and passed 87 of them, according to the research organization Trans Legislation Tracker. (In 2025, the group found that well over 1,000 anti-trans bills were considered and 126 passed.) These included bathroom bills; gender marker bills; bills banning drag, books and gender-inclusive language in schools; and bills restricting access to gender-affirming care. So trans people and their families were leaving states like Texas, Utah and Idaho. Many of them were moving next door, to blue Colorado.

“And then I was standing on a picnic table saying, ‘What if we created a Welcome Wagon?’” At the time Richards, who is now 27, was working in the office of the Colorado state auditor. She began with research. “And in the process I learned how horrible it was in other places. I met a girl who just got in her car and started driving.” This was a truck driver from Texas. Someone from Missouri got a one-way ticket to Denver, where they knew no one. Those people needed a lot more than a Welcome Wagon — they needed help deciding where to settle; they needed transportation and temporary housing; they needed help finding doctors, schools and other resources at their destination. Richards registered a nonprofit organization, quit her job, and started raising money by selling patches at punk music concerts. By June 2024, she had raised less than $6,000. Then Trump got re-elected and donations started pouring in, along with requests for help. The Trans Continental Pipeline has now raised more than $1.5 million, employs two part-time staff members and dozens of volunteers. It has assisted some 400 people, almost 100 of them with what Richards calls “full relocation,” and it has helped 10 similar organizations get off the ground. Most of their clients — internally known as trans-plants — left Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, though since the passage of S.B. 244, a majority of cases have come from Kansas.

Take, for example, D., A. and T., three trans men who asked me not to use their full names, who were part of a large polycule in Lawrence.

When S.B. 244 passed, D. said that he had to leave Kansas. He could not even contemplate being outed. A. decided to go with him. T. wasn’t sure he was emotionally equipped to move. “Everyone I care about is in Kansas,” he told me. “But then we were having a shitload of ICE activity in tiny little Lawrence. I get around on a mobility scooter, I look vaguely Hispanic, even though I’m not, and I look clearly queer.” It was T. who filled out an application on the Trans Continental Pipeline website.

A recent report conducted by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law showed that almost half of the transgender Americans surveyed were considering leaving or had already left their state or the country. Most of them cited the “anti-trans climate” in their state. Many can’t leave, though. Tracy Baney, the woman whose name-change hearing I attended, can’t leave because her 7-year-old daughter is in Kansas.

Abi Boatman, the state legislator, has already had to start her life from scratch once. Back in 2011 — after the end of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy but before the Obama administration allowed trans people to serve openly in the military — Boatman, who had been in the service for more than a decade, came out and was forced to take a medical discharge. Her wife took the kids and left. Only since last fall has Boatman had contact with her older child, and it has been as exhilarating and as difficult as anything she could have imagined. In April, Boatman remarried; she met her wife at an ICE protest in 2018. They held the ceremony on their front porch in Wichita. “This is where I’ve made my life,” she told me on that same front porch. “This is where I live. I don’t think I should have to leave just because some Republican lawmakers think I don’t belong here.”

Lawrence is a town full of cheap vintage shops and queer-friendly bars, a town where there are drag shows every week, a town where people making very little money can afford to live — and when they fall short, the community will reliably step in to cover the night’s drinks or the month’s rent. These are some of the things Siobhan Kirchstein loves about it: her friends at Lawrence Pride, the mutual aid, the performance classes she takes with a drag king named Johnny Diablo, the queer pool tournament in which she has had some excellent showings and the life-work balance she found here since dropping out of her master’s program in religious studies and taking a job as a custodian in one of the lab buildings at the University of Kansas.

Two days after I interviewed Kirchstein at Harbour Lights, the bar that hosts the queer pool tournament, and just over four months after she got the Letter about her driver’s license, she got another letter. “I am reaching out to you from human resources in response to a report received that I have an obligation to follow up on,” it said. “The report received was that you used a restroom in Parker Hall on the first floor in violation of Kansas Senate Bill 244 on June 22, 2026.”

Kirchstein was stunned. Everyone in the building — the people she works with, the people she cleans up after — knows her. Everyone, she thought, had her back. At the beginning, the letter said, “I wish to preface this email by acknowledging this is a sensitive matter and my intention in reaching out is to provide awareness of the report and the law, extend to you an opportunity to be heard, and if helpful, share resources.” Three paragraphs down, it said, “Regardless, please ensure you are adhering to S.B. 244.”

It reminded me of an extraordinary artifact on display at the Brown v. Board of Education museum. It’s a letter from the Public Schools of Topeka to one of the Black teachers in the district. In anticipation of the Supreme Court ordering the desegregation of schools, it terminates her employment, because, it says, white parents probably aren’t going to want a Black teacher in the classroom. “I think I understand that all of you must be under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconveniences which you must experience,” the letter said. It’s that same way of putting a concerned face on dehumanizing demands that Kirchstein described as “soft fascism” the first time we spoke.

Kirchstein’s supervisor suggested she take the afternoon off. After a couple of hours, she made a decision. She forwarded the email she had received to me and a reporter at The Lawrence Times, and left a request for representation on the website of the A.C.L.U. of Kansas. Then she headed over to Harbour Lights to figure out her next steps. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was going to fight.

Do you agree with Kansas law? That you must use the restroom that corresponds with the sex on your original birth certificate and that “any violation of this law may subject the individual to civil and criminal penalties."

"Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws."

And that’s how you come across. It seems very, very, important to you that human beings be placed into one of two boxes, either “male” or “female”. It logically follows that if you don’t congruently fit into one of those two boxes, you aren’t human.

Edited 9 hours ago by Analytics

[smac97]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Quote

From the article:

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

No. Don’t misrepresent the article. From the article, self-identity plus surgical transition = "welcome to use the facility."

Fair enough.  "Welcome to use the facility" = post-operative "trans women."

Other trans women are not allowed to use the facility.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

I still see no reason for there to be a universal limiting principle. Do you think there needs to be a federal law that says that Olympus Spa should be criminally prosecuted or shut down for allowing people who, according to your so-called “limiting principle” are really men?

Rather than having a “limiting principle”, why can’t we just have a social contract where:

1. If you are transexual, don’t try to make waves about (e.g. don’t wave your penis around in places where people don’t expect to see penises, don’t participate in competitive sport leagues where your physiology gives you an unfair advantage)
2. If you are a venue, make common-sense accommodations based upon the individual circumstances
3. Show everybody some grace

Why isn’t that approach sufficient?

The difficulty with the “social contract” approach is that it only functions while the underlying categories remain relatively stable and widely shared. Once law and institutional policy treat self-identification as the sole and decisive criterion, the informal expectations you describe lose their force. The person who declines to “not make waves” is no longer merely being inconsiderate; he is asserting a right that others are expected to honor. At that point, grace and common sense are no longer the governing standards—legal entitlement is.

Olympus Spa illustrates the problem. The spa is not asking the state to criminalize anyone. It is asking to maintain a facility whose core service involves communal female nudity. When the state declares that self-identification overrides that boundary, the “make common-sense accommodations” model has already been displaced by a rule. The remaining question is whether that rule has any coherent limit. So far, none has been supplied.

The same pattern appears in sex-separated sports. An informal expectation that males will not compete in female categories works only so long as the categories themselves are understood to be based on sex. When eligibility is redefined solely by subjective self-identity, the expectation becomes optional, and the competitive and safety interests of female athletes are subordinated to the identity claim.  This is no longer a "live and let live" scenario, but rather a "whose interests are subordinated to others'" scenario.

Grace and case-by-case judgment are valuable, but they are not a substitute for clear categories in domains such as we are seeing here: intimate spaces (Olympus Spa), competitive sport (Lia Thomas, WNBA), prisons, shelters.  These are environments where physical sex remains material. A limiting principle is simply the recognition that those categories cannot remain coherent if they are endlessly revised or overridden by subjective assertion.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Let's be honest. The only reason we are having this conversation is because some politicians have decided this is a useful issue. 

I think this does not accurately characterize, or else understates, the sequence of events. The issue did not originate with politicians inventing a controversy. It arose when institutions and advocacy groups began treating self-identification as sufficient to redefine sex-based categories in sports, prisons, shelters, and intimate facilities, and when those changes produced concrete conflicts over fairness, privacy, and safety.

Some politicians may have later amplified the issue, as they do with most culturally charged questions. That does not mean the underlying tensions were manufactured. Female athletes who lost opportunities, women in shelters who raised safety concerns, and businesses like Olympus Spa that faced legal pressure over nude facilities were responding to real policy shifts, not to campaign messaging.

I'm reminded of this, which I have seen on social media several times:

Quote

Step 1: It's not really happening

Step 2: Yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal

Step 3: It's a good thing, actually

Step 4: People freaking out about it are the real problem

See, e.g., here:

 

Replace CRT with "biological men in women's sports," and it looks like you are at "Step 2."

I think we can criticize political opportunism on all sides without concluding that the only reason the subject exists is electoral calculation. The practical collisions between sex-based boundaries and identity-based claims would still require resolution even if every politician remained silent.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

According to current NCAA policies:

Quote

The participation policy for transgender student-athletes adopted by the Board of Governors and effective February 6, 2025, does not permit competition by an individual assigned male at birth to compete on a women’s team. The policy is clear that there are no waivers available, and students assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team with amended birth certificates or other forms of ID. Student-athletes assigned male at birth may not receive athletic scholarships that are otherwise designated for women. If competition occurs, the team will be considered a mixed team and not eligible to compete against women’s teams. This also applies to a student-athlete assigned male at birth competing as an individual against women. Such individual competition is not permitted under the policy. Any previous policies that permitted mixed team competition against a women’s team are rendered moot and not applicable as the BOG policy adopted in February 2025 supersedes all previous policies.

Are you okay with that policy?

Yes, I am okay with that policy.  I would be in favor of some provision for people with clearly-diagnosed DSDs, but I'm not sure if that is present in the current NCAA guidelines or not.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Or do you think the policy needs to be updated with a “delimiting principle” that defines what a woman is, and then determine eligibility for competing based on that definition? 

I think the policy already has a limiting principle, namely, biological sex.  The policy "does not permit competition by an individual assigned male at birth to compete on a women’s team," with "no waivers available."  Ipso facto,

• {S}tudents assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team with amended birth certificates or other forms of ID.
• Student-athletes assigned male at birth may not receive athletic scholarships that are otherwise designated for women.
• If competition occurs, the team will be considered a mixed team and not eligible to compete against women’s teams.
• This also applies to a student-athlete assigned male at birth competing as an individual against women. Such individual competition is not permitted under the policy.

Putting aside the question for potential exemptions for persons with DSDs, I think this policy works, and is reasonable.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

For the record, I have no problem with this. If you are transgender and want to swim, then swim with the boys. Or don’t swim. That is a reasonable compromise that the stakeholders can make.

It looks like we substantively agree.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

What do you think of the new Kansas law? From today’s New York Times:

TL;DR.  Skimmed it.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Do you agree with Kansas law? That you must use the restroom that corresponds with the sex on your original birth certificate and that “any violation of this law may subject the individual to civil and criminal penalties."

Yes, I agree with the Kansas law, for the same reason as is noted above, namely, that it is based on biological sex.

I am, however, open to listening to alternatives.  If we are to set aside biological sex as a limiting principle, what will replace it?  Subjective "self-identity"?  Nothing?

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

"Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws."

I would submit that calling a requirement that government-issued identification reflect biological sex “arbitrary” and “dehumanizing” misuses both words.

Biological sex is not an arbitrary classification. It is an observable, binary, and medically significant fact in every human being, and which is only in question in a statistically tiny number of situations (people with DSDs). Governments routinely record it for the same reason they record date of birth, height, or citizenship: those facts are relevant to identity verification, public safety, medical treatment, and the administration of sex-based rules (prisons, sports, shelters, etc.). Treating sex as if it were a subjective preference, while treating height or age as fixed, is - in my view - the more "arbitrary" approach.

Nor is accurate recording of sex "dehumanizing." Recognizing physical reality does not deny anyone’s humanity, dignity, or moral worth. It simply declines to rewrite material facts in official documents. We do not allow people to declare a different age, height, or blood type on a license because they strongly identify with another number. Sex is not, or should not be, uniquely exempt from that principle.

One can debate the wisdom or scope of any particular ID policy. But describing the recognition of biological sex as fascistic or dehumanizing collapses serious disagreement into moral denunciation. It also inverts the ordinary meaning of “arbitrary”: a rule grounded in a stable, empirically verifiable characteristic is the opposite of arbitrary.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

And that’s how you come across.

I guess that takes us to "Step 4" ("People freaking out about it are the real problem").

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

It seems very, very, important to you that human beings be placed into one of two boxes, either “male” or “female”. It logically follows that if you don’t congruently fit into one of those two boxes, you aren’t human.

That does not follow at all.

Recognizing that human beings are a sexually binary species does not imply that every individual must be a perfect, unambiguous exemplar of one sex or the other in order to count as human. Developmental variations and disorders of sex development exist. They are medical conditions that occur within the binary framework of male and female; they do not create additional sexes or dissolve the binary.

We do not say that someone born with an extra chromosome, a limb difference, or a congenital heart defect is “not human” because they deviate from the statistical norm. The same logic applies here. Atypical development does not erase the underlying categories; it is defined by reference to them.

The claim that affirming the sex binary somehow expels people with DSDs from the human family is a non sequitur. It confuses the existence of edge cases with the non-existence of the categories those edge cases depart from.

I think it matters that we try, as best we can, to seek and defend what is true. When a person's request is not merely for compassion or accommodation, but for the affirmation (increasingly demanded more than merely "requested") that sex is determined by identity rather than biology, we are being asked to treat a proposition at odds with physical reality as if it were fact. That is a different kind of demand, and it is reasonable to decline it where, as here, there are ample reasoned grounds to disagree with the request/demand.  

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 8 hours ago by smac97

[SeekingUnderstanding]

16 hours ago, BlipBlap said:

The problem is the assertion that "trans" people are merely "born that way" holds no water and that current pro-trans discourse wants to force the general population to simply take them as an otherwise "normal person" i.e. a person that is not otherwise afflicted with a psychiatric problem.  Banning any kind of conversion therapy supports this idea and is an attack against the autonomy of those that see their condition as a problem.

Hey BlipBlap. Always fun to see new posters around.

16 hours ago, BlipBlap said:

While one can say that it can be a natural conclusion that one can be born in a physical body that doesn't align with their spiritual gender, that doesn't mean said conclusion is correct or logically valid.  The first issue is presuming that gender was ever meant to be separate from biological sex.  The second is that, if it was a trial to overcome, how does one go about proving such?  The more likely notion is that "being born in the wrong body" isn't the trial, but the feeling itself is the trial.

I wasn't presuming that gender was "meant" to be separate from biological sex. It's my understanding that under Latter-day Saint theology, the spirit is a distinct entity from the physical body. That among many other characteristics the spirit has a gender (you'll have to tell me if it makes sense for you to define a spirit's "biological" sex). The spirit predates the physical body. Sometimes the physical body has defects because we live in a fallen world. Many of these defects prevent the physical body from matching the spiritual. For example, some genetic defects result in significant neurological impairment, blindness, and many other ailments. Why does your god allow his children's physical bodies not to align with their spirit body in these cases? How does he always ensure that spirit gender and biological sex are always in alignment? And why does he always make sure that lines up when he allows so many other horrors in the world?

 

[Amulek]

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Rather than having a “limiting principle”, why can’t we just have a social contract where:

1. If you are transexual, don’t try to make waves about (e.g. don’t wave your penis around in places where people don’t expect to see penises, don’t participate in competitive sport leagues where your physiology gives you an unfair advantage)
2. If you are a venue, make common-sense accommodations based upon the individual circumstances
3. Show everybody some grace

Why isn’t that approach sufficient?

When it comes to determining who is a "woman" for purposes of women's only spaces and set asides (e.g., women's sport, women's health, women's education, and women's prisons), the answer for me, at least, is "it depends."

If inclusion doesn't defeat the purpose of having the category in the first place, then I don't see the harm in allowing for it.

In places like competitive sport, however, I believe excluding male-bodied athletes from female events is the (obvious) right answer. In elite sport, there's just too much of a competitive advantage to having access to male-levels of testosterone during development. That's born out by science, and it's not at all controversial. It's why the IOC recently updated their guidelines for trans athletes in women's sports to be determined by the presence of the SRY gene, as it is "fixed throughout life and represents highly accurate evidence the athlete experiences male sex development" (link). I believe the NCAA has taken a different path to approach the issue, but they seem to be targeting the same kind of result.

 

[smac97]

28 minutes ago, Amulek said:

When it comes to determining who is a "woman" for purposes of women's only spaces and set asides (e.g., women's sport, women's health, women's education, and women's prisons), the answer for me, at least, is "it depends."

If inclusion doesn't defeat the purpose of having the category in the first place, then I don't see the harm in allowing for it.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.  When you say “it depends” and that inclusion is acceptable so long as it “doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the category,” who decides whether the purpose has been defeated, and by what measure?

• In a women’s prison, is the purpose defeated only after a certain number of male-bodied people are housed there, or after a single assault, or after female inmates report that they no longer feel safe, or after they express a desire for privacy from biological males?
• In elite women’s sports, are there any other legitimate "purposes" in addition to competitive advantages (of biological males)?  Safety?  Privacy? 
• In a domestic-violence shelter, is the purpose defeated when women stop using the shelter, or only when a formal incident is documented?
• What is the purpose of a women’s bathroom or locker room? Is it solely about toilets and sinks, or does it also include privacy, dignity, and the expectation of not undressing or performing intimate functions in the presence of biological males?
• Under the “doesn’t defeat the purpose” test, how would we know when that purpose has been defeated? Does it require a documented incident of voyeurism, assault, or exposure? Or is the loss of perceived safety and privacy by female users enough?
• Should the women who feel uncomfortable, or unsafe, or who want privacy from biological males, be required to provide evidence of harm before the boundary can be enforced? If so, what form of evidence is sufficient?
• Once access to a facility is opened on the basis of self-identification, how is the line drawn for the next person who identifies as a woman? Is there a limiting point, or does each case simply get evaluated after the fact for whether harm occurred?

If the test is whether inclusion defeats the purpose, that seems to require us to wait for measurable harm before drawing a boundary. Is that the rule you are proposing—that sex-based categories must remain open until harm is first demonstrated?

Also, once the purpose is judged to have been defeated in a particular case, what happens? Does the male-bodied person who was included get removed, or does the category itself get redefined going forward?

I’m asking because “it depends” and “as long as it doesn’t defeat the purpose” sound flexible, but they appear to shift the burden onto the very people the category was created to protect - women - because it seems to require that they prove harm after the fact rather than allowing the category to rest on the ordinary, predictable differences that justified sex-based rules in the first place. How do you see that working without effectively eroding the category?

Very interesting stuff.  Thank you for weighing in.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

33 minutes ago, Amulek said:

If inclusion doesn't defeat the purpose of having the category in the first place, then I don't see the harm in allowing for it.

This is a good rule, imo.  
 

Unfortunately laws can backfire when it comes to protection and equal rights and access, so they need to be cautious with them.

One of the prime examples are less female coaches now than before the law tried to ensure female sports in schools got equal financial support.  Once the coaches for female sports got paid decently, men moved in to compete for the jobs and cultural bias that men are better at sports and the fact that male coaches tend to have stronger resumes because of the greater attention male sports got and gets ensured men were more likely to get the coaching jobs even for female sports.  

So more female athletes, but fewer of them can turn their passion into a career of coaching. 
 

https://appliedsportpsych.org/blog/2022/08/the-50th-anniversary-of-title-ix-comes-with-a-catch-fewer-women-coaches/

[smac97]

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

I wasn't presuming that gender was "meant" to be separate from biological sex.

It seems like this distinction is a central tenet of the concept of "trans"ness.  "'Sex' is what's between your legs, 'gender' is what's between your ears" and all that?

I would like to better understand this.

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It's my understanding that under Latter-day Saint theology, the spirit is a distinct entity from the physical body.

I'm not sure "distinct entity" is apt.  See, e.g., here:

Quote

In Latter-day Saint terminology "soul" is used in various ways, with diverse connotations found throughout the scriptures and in other Church writings. However, the word also has a precise definition given in latter-day revelation: the soul is the united entity of the spirit with the physical body (D&C 88:15-16). This concept is enhanced by an understanding of (1) the creation of humankind as a uniting of the spirit body and the physical body (Gen. 2:7; Moses 3:7; Abr. 5:7)(2) the knowledge that God himself is embodied (D&C 130:22); and (3) the doctrine that all mortals will ultimately undergo a literal resurrection of the physical body (Alma 40:17-23;41:2; 2 Ne. 9:13).

 

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

That among many other characteristics the spirit has a gender (you'll have to tell me if it makes sense for you to define a spirit's "biological" sex). The spirit predates the physical body.

This sounds accurate, except it might be more accurate in this context to speak of the "spirit body" and "physical body."

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Sometimes the physical body has defects because we live in a fallen world.

Yes.

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Many of these defects prevent the physical body from matching the spiritual.

Not sure what "matching the spiritual" means, but I surmise you are headed toward "a woman's spirit may be placed in a man's body."

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

For example, some genetic defects result in significant neurological impairment, blindness, and many other ailments. Why does your god allow his children's physical bodies not to align with their spirit body in these cases?

Hard to give a definitive answer to this.

45 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

How does he always ensure that spirit gender and biological sex are always in alignment?

Well, that becomes a matter of faith, and thus takes the discussion outside the ambit of public policy discussions about "what is a woman."

Thanks,

-Smac

[Analytics]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

The difficulty with the “social contract” approach is that it only functions while the underlying categories remain relatively stable and widely shared.

They are stable and widely shared.

To the extent they are not, who is causing the confusion? For example, you are the person who insists for purposes of selecting which restroom to use  that Aydian Dowling (pictured below) is a woman.

 

 

Sporting events can be unfair for many reasons, including others having genetic advantages. In public restrooms sometimes you see, hear, and smell things that make you feel uncomfortable or even unsafe. If you change at the gym, you are going to see things in the locker room that will make you feel uncomfortable. You might be seen naked by people you wouldn't choose to be seen naked by. If you are incarcerated in prison, you aren't necessarily going to be safe. If you go to a shelter, there might be people there who don't make you feel safe, either. 

Those are all real issues. But only on exceedingly rare occasions is the person guilty of causing the harm or discomfort transgender.

You don't seem interested in talking about fixing these problems in the 99.999% of the time transgender people aren't to blame, and only care about these problems in the 0.001% of the time when transgender people can be blamed.

That's weird.

What is also weird is your proposed solution: requiring people like Aydian Dowling (photograph above) to have an "F" on their drivers license and legally requiring them to use the women's restroom and the women's locker room.

Can you see how your favored solution to this could cause some of the problems you claim you are trying to avoid?

What is your basis for thinking that the laws you support are doing more good than harm?

Edited 5 hours ago by Analytics

[SeekingUnderstanding]

33 minutes ago, smac97 said:

It seems like this distinction is a central tenet of the concept of "trans"ness.  "'Sex' is what's between your legs, 'gender' is what's between your ears" and all that?

I would like to better understand this.

I'm not sure "distinct entity" is apt.  See, e.g., here:

 

This sounds accurate, except it might be more accurate in this context to speak of the "spirit body" and "physical body."

Yes.

Not sure what "matching the spiritual" means, but I surmise you are headed toward "a woman's spirit may be placed in a man's body."

Hard to give a definitive answer to this.

Well, that becomes a matter of faith, and thus takes the discussion outside the ambit of public policy discussions about "what is a woman."

Thanks,

-Smac

I’m sorry, but you’ll need to read back to understand the context that you’re replying to. 

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, Amulek said:

In places like competitive sport, however, I believe excluding male-bodied athletes from female events is the (obvious) right answer. In elite sport, there's just too much of a competitive advantage to having access to male-levels of testosterone during development. That's born out by science, and it's not at all controversial. It's why the IOC recently updated their guidelines for trans athletes in women's sports to be determined by the presence of the SRY gene, as it is "fixed throughout life and represents highly accurate evidence the athlete experiences male sex development" (link). I believe the NCAA has taken a different path to approach the issue, but they seem to be targeting the same kind of result.

 

I don't disagree with you on this point, but I'm quite happy to let leagues figure such things out how they see best. Depending upon the sport, league, and individual, there are situations when the particular individual is pretty average. Should leages be legally required to exclude trans athletes, even if they aren't breaking the curve? I don't know, but if you aren't a stakeholder, it really isn't something to worry about.

When I was about 10 I was on a flag football team, and one of the better players on the team was a girl. In terms of size and athleticism, she was above-average compared to the boys in the league, and overall she fit right in. The coaches in that league let her play with the boys, and I think that is the right decision. I certainly don't want the U.S. Congress making laws about whether she should be allowed to play in our league. They aren't stakeholders in it.

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Hey BlipBlap. Always fun to see new posters around.

I wasn't presuming that gender was "meant" to be separate from biological sex. It's my understanding that under Latter-day Saint theology, the spirit is a distinct entity from the physical body. That among many other characteristics the spirit has a gender (you'll have to tell me if it makes sense for you to define a spirit's "biological" sex). The spirit predates the physical body. Sometimes the physical body has defects because we live in a fallen world. Many of these defects prevent the physical body from matching the spiritual. For example, some genetic defects result in significant neurological impairment, blindness, and many other ailments. Why does your god allow his children's physical bodies not to align with their spirit body in these cases? How does he always ensure that spirit gender and biological sex are always in alignment? And why does he always make sure that lines up when he allows so many other horrors in the world?

 

I totally agree. Mormons believe spirits have a gender that existed before the physical body. They believe this spirit-gender is a very important attribute of who they are on the inside. And they believe you can learn important truths by listening to the spirit.

This means that to a Mormon, "I feel like on the inside I'm really a woman" is an intelligible claim about a real thing, and that the mechanism used to come to this belief is a reliable truth-finding mechanism. Wouldn't that mean Mormons should be especially receptive to the idea that when somebody says they feel like a woman on the inside, they really are?

[SeekingUnderstanding]

6 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Wouldn't that mean Mormons should be especially receptive to the idea that when somebody says they feel like a woman on the inside, they really are?

This is exactly the point I made in the post that blipblap replied to. I’ve yet to see the “limiting principle” as to why God allows all manner of horrors on earth but draws the line at spirit / physical body gender / sex alignment. 

[smac97]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Quote

The difficulty with the “social contract” approach is that it only functions while the underlying categories remain relatively stable and widely shared.

They are stable and widely shared.

I hope you will clarify what you are saying here.  As I see it, the categories ("man" and "woman") were stable and widely shared for a very long time. What has changed is that a concerted effort has been made, in a relatively short period, to redefine “woman” from an adult human female to a person of either sex who subjectively "identifies" as one.

That redefinition and lack of stability, and differing, rather than "shared," understanding are precisely why we are having this conversation. When the meaning of the category itself becomes contested, the informal social-contract approach loses the common ground it needs to function. People can no longer rely on a shared understanding of who belongs in the category; they are instead asked to accept a subjective claim that may contradict physical reality.

The stability you assert is what existed before the redefinition project began. The current dispute is evidence that the prior consensus has been disrupted, not proof that it remains intact.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

To the extent they are not, who is causing the confusion?

I think what we are seeing is not "confusion," but rather disagreement.

Nobody is "confused" about whether Lia Thomas is biologically male.  The issue is whether he should compete against women because he "identifies" as a woman.  That's disagreement.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

For example, you are the person who insists for purposes of selecting which restroom to use  that Aydian Dowling (pictured below) is a woman.

Saw this on Facebook, both apparently of the above person at different points in her life:

"{F}or purposes of selecting which restroom to use," I think the person on the left would use the woman's bathroom.  The dispute, then, is about whether this woman, having taken cosmetic, medical and sartorial measures to deliberately appear and "identify" as the person on the right (the numerically same person as the one on the left), actually is a man because of those measures and identity.  

Aydian Dowling, who identifies as "trans man," is biologically female.  She has taken steps to present as male—masculinized appearance, mastectomy, facial hair, etc.—and identifies as a man.

You seem to think that because she has adopted sociological indicia of being a male, a man, she therefore actually became a man.  I think your position requires A) denial of reality and B) radically redefining basic words (e.g., "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman").  My position requires neither.

Some assert that her subjective self-identification makes her a man for purposes of sex-separated spaces. Others maintain that sex remains the relevant criterion.  Those are competing definitions, not a failure to understand the same definition. In my view, the prior, widely shared understanding was that “woman” refers to an adult human female. The current dispute exists because that definition has been contested and, in some settings, replaced by one based on self-identification or appearance. Calling the resulting conflict “confusion” obscures what is actually happening, namely, a substantive disagreement over which definition should govern.

I do not think a man can become a woman by "identifying" as one, or by any other means, nor can a woman become a man by "identifying" as one, even if she goes so far as to undergo an elective mastectomy and other medical procedures, and otherwise wear cloths and adopt affectations intended to help her approximate the outward appearance of a man.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Sporting events can be unfair for many reasons, including others having genetic advantages. In public restrooms sometimes you see, hear, and smell things that make you feel uncomfortable or even unsafe. If you change at the gym, you are going to see things in the locker room that will make you feel uncomfortable. You might be seen naked by people you wouldn't choose to be seen naked by. If you are incarcerated in prison, you aren't necessarily going to be safe. If you go to a shelter, there might be people there who don't make you feel safe, either. 

Those statements are true as far as they go, but they do not answer the question of whether sex is a rational basis for separation.

Yes, genetic differences create competitive advantages within sexes.  Yes, public restrooms and locker rooms can involve discomfort.  Yes, prisons and shelters can be unsafe.  The existence of residual unfairness or discomfort does not mean that removing a major, predictable source of it is irrelevant.  Sex-based categories in sports exist because the average male performance advantage is large, well-documented, and not erased by self-identification.

Sex-separated bathrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and prison units exist because of persistent differences in strength, patterns of sexual offense, and the reasonable expectation of privacy from the opposite sex. These are not arbitrary preferences.  They are responses to material realities that affect safety, fairness, and dignity at scale.

Pointing out that perfect safety or perfect fairness is unattainable does not justify eliminating one of the primary mechanisms used to approximate them. The fact that some problems remain after sex separation is not evidence that sex separation accomplishes nothing.

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Those are all real issues. But only on exceedingly rare occasions is the person guilty of causing the harm or discomfort transgender.

You don't seem interested in talking about fixing these problems in the 99.999% of the time transgender people aren't to blame, and only care about these problems in the 0.001% of the time when transgender people can be blamed.

That's weird.

What is also weird is your our proposed solution: requiring people like Aydian Dowling (photograph above) to have an "F" on their drivers license and legally requiring them to use the women's restroom and the women's locker room.

Can you see how your favored solution to this could cause some of the problems you claim you are trying to avoid?

What is your basis for thinking that the laws you support are doing more good than harm?

Two separate issues are being combined here.

The first is what government records should say. Recording biological sex on a driver’s license is a matter of accurate identification. It does not, by itself, dictate every social interaction or every facility rule. Many jurisdictions have long recorded sex without micromanaging every bathroom decision in daily life.

The second is the policy for sex-separated spaces. A consistent sex-based rule means that males (however they identify or present) do not use women’s facilities, and females (however they identify or present) do not use men’s facilities. I acknowledge that rule will sometimes produce awkward situations for people whose appearance does not match their sex. That is a real cost. But then, the alternative rule (access according to self-identification) also produces costs: loss of privacy, safety concerns, and competitive unfairness for the group the spaces were created to protect.

The question is not whether any rule is cost-free. Rather, I think the we should examine which set of costs is more coherent with the purpose of the spaces. Sex-based separation exists because of average physical differences and patterns of risk that track sex, not appearance or identity. Maintaining that basis may well be uncomfortable for a small number of people whose present themselves in ways which diverge from their sex.  But then, setting aside that distinction may be uncomfortable for others. Replacing it with self-identification shifts the burden onto the much larger group for whom the spaces were designed, and removes any stable limiting principle.  And it also obliterates the purpose for which sex-specific spaces have existed.

I do not claim the sex-based approach creates zero friction. I propose it is still better aligned with the reasons the categories exist than a policy that treats sex as irrelevant once an identity claim is made.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 4 hours ago by smac97

[Calm]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

This means that to a Mormon, "I feel like on the inside I'm really a woman" is an intelligible claim about a real thing, and that the mechanism used to come to this belief is a reliable truth-finding mechanism. Wouldn't that mean Mormons should be especially receptive to the idea that when somebody says they feel like a woman on the inside, they really are?

It is the same issue imo as whether one believes the inner voice is the Light of Christ or the ‘natural man’ when it comes to beliefs that contradict church teachings, scriptures, etc.   How can you tell?

Edited 1 hour ago by Calm