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

[Calm]

On 9/5/2026 at 12:02 AM, smac97 said:

Interesting how in all this discussion there is precious little commentary on the impact on women and girls,

Are you referring to this ongoing discussion here?

Edited 21 hours ago by Calm

[california boy]

On 9/5/2026 at 9:18 AM, smac97 said:

 

I did pick a lane. You are running two sentences together.

My lane: Sex is a binary. Male and female. Two reproductive classes. Not a spectrum of sexes.

The lane I am critiquing, but not driving in: Traits associated with sex (hormones, height, genital development) can vary in degree. Variation around two sexes is not a third sex and not “sex is a spectrum.” Height varies. That does not make “adult” a spectrum of sexes.

If I have granted “spectrum” at all, it was for those traits, not for sex. That is the same distinction as adult/child vs age. I am not switching lanes. I am refusing to let “traits vary” mean “there are not two sexes.”

So: binary for sex. Continua for some measurements. Those are not the same claim. The “pick a lane” line only works if you treat them as the same word. I do not.

Although we, as per usual, strongly disagree, I do appreciate your generally measured responses and comments.  I think we communicate more meaningfully when we both attempt to go that way.  I will work to improve myself.

Thanks,

-Smac

I am unclear which lane you picked.  What binary lane do you put someone who is born intersexed?

[smac97]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Interesting how in all this discussion there is precious little commentary on the impact on women and girls, the persons for whom sex-segregated spaces were created.  Instead, almost the entire focus is on men who want to enter into women-only spaces....

Are you sure the real problem is you aren’t listening?

I think there can be, in some circumstances, the tendency to construe disagreement as "not listening."

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Let me address this another way. I worked really hard to create an unbiased prompt that asks AI to address this issue. The prompt says to ignore the wellbeing of transgender individuals and focus only on the wellbeing of cisgender women and girls. I then fed the prompt to Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT.

All three models gave the same answer: if the objective is to minimize the expected harm to (cisgender) women and girls, then people should be free to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity.

Prompt:

Grok's full answer:

I agree with ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok on this: your preferred solution--requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex rather than their gender expression--harms women and girls.

I then did a follow-up question: which group does your preferred solution harm more: transgender women and girls, or cisgender women and girls? The answer here was obvious: your policy harms both groups, but harms transgender women and girls much more.

I appreciate you putting a prompt in writing. I do not accept the result as settling the question, for reasons that have nothing to do with “not listening.”

1. Safety is not the only reason those rooms exist.  I've said this a lot, and I think you have overwhelmingly ignored and sidestepped it.  (I also surmise that this ignoring/sidestepping is a studied and intentional element of the motte-and-bailey tactics being used.) Sex-segregated bathrooms were also built for privacy and propriety: undressing, menstruation, a locked stall next to a stranger of the other sex. “No statistically significant spike in reported stranger rape after a city ordinance” does not answer that. A woman can be wronged without needing to become a crime statistic.

Your prompt told the models to weight assault frequency and to treat discomfort as a lesser, “less quantified” harm. That is a value choice baked into the prompt, not a finding.

I have been talking about women and girls the whole time. Reducing their interest to “did a paper find more police reports?” is how the impact on them keeps disappearing.

2. There is still no limiting principle.  I have have been addressing, and you have been largely ignoring/sidestepping, the utter lack of any meaningful limiting principles in your policy proposal.  Again, I think this is a studied element of the motte-and-bailey strategy. “Use the room that matches identity” has no stable stop. Identity is self-reported. If the rule is the claim, then any male who makes the claim is in. You could, I suppose, add “must pass,” “must have surgery,” “must have a letter." Those are different policies. But you have not proposed or defended any of them, and I think intentionally and deliberately so.  I surmise that you do not want there to be any limiting principles, because as soon as you present one there will be vitriol from quarters of the trans advocacy groups calling those limiting principles "bigotry" and whatnot. And without limiting principles, the foreseeable effect of your proposal is the eradication of sex-segregated spaces.  That is not a moral panic. It is me anticipating the motte-and-bailey switcheroo, and you sidestepping it.  To wit...

3. Bathrooms will not stay in their box.  If the legal justification is “identity is what the sexed space tracks, and doubting that is bigotry,” there is no principled line that keeps that same justification for putting men in women's changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports. Those are not “other topics.” They are the same rule applied to rooms where the stakes are higher. I have already said I want a bright line for that reason. Motte-and-bailey will show up there too: motte = “rare DSDs / rare violent incidents”; bailey = males in the women’s category (bathrooms and changing rooms and sports and prisons). 

4. The AI exercise is not evidence.  You wrote a prompt that tells three consumer models to ignore one group, treat anecdotes as almost weightless, and compare two crude policies. Those models are trained on the same institutional language your prompt is written in. That they returned Policy A is not a natural experiment. It is three autocomplete engines agreeing with the literature they were fed. Grok’s answer even concedes discomfort under A is “plausible but less quantified,” then still picks A. That is a weighting rule, not a measurement of what women are owed.

5. Policy B as you defined it is not quite my view.  I am not trying to march passing trans men into the ladies’ room as a gotcha. The rule I have been defending is sex, observed and recorded as the two reproductive classes—not “whoever looks the part,” and not “whoever says the words.” Awkward edge cases exist. They are not a reason to admit the entire male class on a declaration. Gender-nonconforming women already belong in the women’s room. A sex rule does not require them to look feminine enough for a stranger’s taste. An identity rule does invite strangers to police appearance, which is the confrontation scenario your prompt attributes only to Policy B.

6. Other costs your prompt underweighs:

• Avoidance: girls who will not use the school restroom, women who skip public facilities. That is harm even when no assault is filed.
• Predation: the question is not “do most trans people assault women?” It is whether a self-ID door is usable by men who are not dysphoric and do not care about your ordinance’s spirit. The obvious and foreseeable answer is "Yes."  
• Single-occupancy is the actual harm-reducer both sides can live with. Expanding those does not require renaming sex.
• Category collapse: if “woman” for the door means identity, you have not minimized harm to women. You have changed who counts as the group whose harm you were supposed to measure.

Men being told they may not enter the women's bathrooms, and vice versa, is not the same kind of injury as women losing a sexed space. One is a boundary. The other is the erasure of the boundary. I can want people with dysphoria treated decently (medical care, safety from assault, single-user options) without conceding that the women’s room is the remedy. Kindness does not require us to pretend a male is a woman so that the prompt can close.

I will keep trying to be measured. I will not treat three chatbots and a harm-only-if-felony frame as the last word on why those doors say “women.”

Thanks,

-Smac

[smac97]

4 hours ago, california boy said:

Quote

My lane: Sex is a binary. Male and female. Two reproductive classes. Not a spectrum of sexes.

I am unclear which lane you picked.  

The one I labeled "My lane."

4 hours ago, california boy said:

What binary lane do you put someone who is born intersexed?

First, I will again note that these references to people with DSDs are a distraction, as we all know that what is really being discussed is policy preferences designed to let unambiguously male persons into women's spaces.

Second, I respectfully reject the claim that there are more than two sexes.  There is a sexual binary: male and female. That is it. There is no third sex and no sexless kind of human. Every person is male, female, or (in vanishingly rare DSDs) a disordered mix of those two developmental pathways. Surface uncertainty is not a third category. Modern testing resolves almost all of those cases to one pathway. The handful that stay mixed are still not a third sex.

For people with some forms of DSD, I have acknowledged, several times now, that some case-by-case allowances and accommodations can be made for the exceedingly small number of persons who have a DSD and whose biological sex is insuperably epistemically uncertain.  

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

21 minutes ago, smac97 said:

think there can be, in some circumstances, the tendency to construe disagreement as "not listening."

Except what you said was there wasn’t commentary on the impact of women and girls…but there was.  Even if you disagreed it was an accurate assessment, it was still present.  So it looks pretty much like “not listening” to me when you claimed discussion on impact on females was missing or “precious little”.

Quote

Interesting how in all this discussion there is precious little commentary on the impact on women and girls,

 

Edited 14 hours ago by Calm

[smac97]

21 minutes ago, Calm said:

Except what you said was there wasn’t commentary on the impact of women and girls…but there was.  Even if you disagreed it was an accurate assessment, it was still present.  So it looks pretty much like “not listening” to me when you claimed discussion on impact on females was missing or “precious little”.

 

I don't think Analytics has commented on this much.  I should have been more clear about that. My apologies.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

I don't think Analytics has commented on this much.  I should have been more clear about that. My apologies.

Thanks,

-Smac

He has posted a number of pictures of trans men and commented on how well that’s going to go over with women and girls when these trans men are forced to use female only restrooms (or none at all if they are the only ones available).

That repeated observation included comments about women’s reactions…which became my primary focus.  For example:

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/11/#findComment-1210274247

Quote

Common sense says the person on the right should use the men's room. Our society was working perfectly fine letting common sense rule that way. 

But now you want laws that forbid that. Why do you care? Why do we need laws that force the person on the right to use the women's restroom? Does that make the women's restroom safer? Less awkward? More private? Why can't we just be civilized people in a free society, use the restroom that makes the most sense, and not obsess about other people's bodies?

This one’s purpose is solely to point out women and girls might not want trans men who present as men in their space:

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/12/#findComment-1210274294

 

Edited 11 hours ago by Calm

[Calm]

Also:

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/14/#findComment-1210274436

Quote

If they go into the women's restroom as they are legally required to do, they'll predictably need to explain to terrifiedwomen and cops that they are "women" who are there because they are legally required to use those facilities. Over and over and over.

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/113354-scotus-decision-ban-on-talk-conversion-therapy-is-unconstitutional/page/14/#findComment-1210274474

Quote

d love to hear a professional psychologist explain why requiring this individual to use women's restroom would be psychologically beneficial to women and girls

I am going to stop now, my estimate is a quarter to a third of analytics’ posts that I read through again included explicit comments while some others it’s implied imo.

Edited 10 hours ago by Calm

[Analytics]

11 hours ago, smac97 said:

I think there can be, in some circumstances, the tendency to construe disagreement as "not listening."

I appreciate you putting a prompt in writing. I do not accept the result as settling the question, for reasons that have nothing to do with “not listening.”

1. Safety is not the only reason those rooms exist.  I've said this a lot, and I think you have overwhelmingly ignored and sidestepped it.  (I also surmise that this ignoring/sidestepping is a studied and intentional element of the motte-and-bailey tactics being used.) Sex-segregated bathrooms were also built for privacy and propriety: undressing, menstruation, a locked stall next to a stranger of the other sex. “No statistically significant spike in reported stranger rape after a city ordinance” does not answer that. A woman can be wronged without needing to become a crime statistic.

Your prompt told the models to weight assault frequency and to treat discomfort as a lesser, “less quantified” harm. That is a value choice baked into the prompt, not a finding.

I have been talking about women and girls the whole time. Reducing their interest to “did a paper find more police reports?” is how the impact on them keeps disappearing.

2. There is still no limiting principle.  I have have been addressing, and you have been largely ignoring/sidestepping, the utter lack of any meaningful limiting principles in your policy proposal.  Again, I think this is a studied element of the motte-and-bailey strategy. “Use the room that matches identity” has no stable stop. Identity is self-reported. If the rule is the claim, then any male who makes the claim is in. You could, I suppose, add “must pass,” “must have surgery,” “must have a letter." Those are different policies. But you have not proposed or defended any of them, and I think intentionally and deliberately so.  I surmise that you do not want there to be any limiting principles, because as soon as you present one there will be vitriol from quarters of the trans advocacy groups calling those limiting principles "bigotry" and whatnot. And without limiting principles, the foreseeable effect of your proposal is the eradication of sex-segregated spaces.  That is not a moral panic. It is me anticipating the motte-and-bailey switcheroo, and you sidestepping it.  To wit...

3. Bathrooms will not stay in their box.  If the legal justification is “identity is what the sexed space tracks, and doubting that is bigotry,” there is no principled line that keeps that same justification for putting men in women's changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports. Those are not “other topics.” They are the same rule applied to rooms where the stakes are higher. I have already said I want a bright line for that reason. Motte-and-bailey will show up there too: motte = “rare DSDs / rare violent incidents”; bailey = males in the women’s category (bathrooms and changing rooms and sports and prisons). 

4. The AI exercise is not evidence.  You wrote a prompt that tells three consumer models to ignore one group, treat anecdotes as almost weightless, and compare two crude policies. Those models are trained on the same institutional language your prompt is written in. That they returned Policy A is not a natural experiment. It is three autocomplete engines agreeing with the literature they were fed. Grok’s answer even concedes discomfort under A is “plausible but less quantified,” then still picks A. That is a weighting rule, not a measurement of what women are owed.

5. Policy B as you defined it is not quite my view.  I am not trying to march passing trans men into the ladies’ room as a gotcha. The rule I have been defending is sex, observed and recorded as the two reproductive classes—not “whoever looks the part,” and not “whoever says the words.” Awkward edge cases exist. They are not a reason to admit the entire male class on a declaration. Gender-nonconforming women already belong in the women’s room. A sex rule does not require them to look feminine enough for a stranger’s taste. An identity rule does invite strangers to police appearance, which is the confrontation scenario your prompt attributes only to Policy B.

6. Other costs your prompt underweighs:

• Avoidance: girls who will not use the school restroom, women who skip public facilities. That is harm even when no assault is filed.
• Predation: the question is not “do most trans people assault women?” It is whether a self-ID door is usable by men who are not dysphoric and do not care about your ordinance’s spirit. The obvious and foreseeable answer is "Yes."  
• Single-occupancy is the actual harm-reducer both sides can live with. Expanding those does not require renaming sex.
• Category collapse: if “woman” for the door means identity, you have not minimized harm to women. You have changed who counts as the group whose harm you were supposed to measure.

Men being told they may not enter the women's bathrooms, and vice versa, is not the same kind of injury as women losing a sexed space. One is a boundary. The other is the erasure of the boundary. I can want people with dysphoria treated decently (medical care, safety from assault, single-user options) without conceding that the women’s room is the remedy. Kindness does not require us to pretend a male is a woman so that the prompt can close.

I will keep trying to be measured. I will not treat three chatbots and a harm-only-if-felony frame as the last word on why those doors say “women.”

Thanks,

-Smac

Sigh. You are ignoring what I say, fighting against a straw man, and making wild proposals that will harm the people you say you want to protect (i.e. woman and girls--using your definitions).

Or so it seems to me. I asked ChatGPT to look at every post in this thread and evaluate this. I’ll put the prompt in a quote box and GPT’s response below in blue.

Quote

Please review this entire conversation, from page 10 through 23. In the question below, please interpret “women and girls” to strictly mean biological woman and girls, regardless of their gender identity and expression. Then answer the following questions:

1- Has Analytics addressed the impact of the various bathroom policies on women and girls? How much?

2- Has he argued that Smac’s proposed laws will do more harm than good to women and girls, and that is one of the main reasons he opposes them?

3- Does his preferred bathroom policies require the formulation of a strict “limiting principle”? If not, should he be required to articulate a limiting principle?

4- Would expanding Analytics’s reasoning to other settings give men a carte blanche to enter women's changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports?

5- Is Analytics arguing that the word “woman” be radically redefined?

6- In your opinion, is "the foreseeable effect of Analytics proposal is the eradication of sex-segregated spaces”? Has Smac provided any valid evidence to support this view?

7- In your opinion, which proposal is more radical, Smac’s or Analytics’s? Do you think Analytics’s proposal will lead to the eradication of sex segregated spaces?

Carefully read every single post in these pages, and then briefly answer each of those questions in 1-3 sentences. After you answer the questions, provide perhaps a dozen quotes that give a representative sample of what was said that supports your conclusions.

GPT:

I read the supplied conversation from forum pages 10 through 23, including the later posts where Analytics and Smac clarify positions that were less precise earlier. I am using “women and girls” exactly as you requested: biological females, regardless of gender identity or expression.

Answers

1. Has Analytics addressed the impact of the various bathroom policies on women and girls? How much?
Yes, substantially and repeatedly. A recurring part of his argument is that a strict biological-sex rule itself harms females—particularly by requiring very male-presenting biological females to enter women’s facilities, thereby creating fear, confrontation, and privacy problems for other females. My read is broadly consistent with Calm’s later estimate that roughly one-quarter to one-third of Analytics’s posts contained explicit discussion of the impact on females, with the issue implicit in additional posts.

2. Has he argued that Smac’s proposed laws will do more harm than good to women and girls, and that this is one of the main reasons he opposes them?
Yes. Analytics repeatedly frames the issue as a harm-benefit comparison, saying Smac’s laws create “real-world problems to solve a hypothetical problem,” questioning whether they do “more good than harm,” and eventually stating expressly that the biological-sex requirement “harms women and girls.” That is clearly one major reason for his opposition, although not the only one; he also emphasizes liberty, harms to transgender people, lack of demonstrated need, and legal/constitutional concerns.

3. Does his preferred bathroom policy require the formulation of a strict “limiting principle”? If not, should he be required to articulate one?
No strict categorical limiting principle is logically required by his basic proposal, because his proposal is essentially “don’t enact a law assigning everyone to a restroom by sex.” He nevertheless eventually articulates a softer principle: use the restroom that minimizes discomfort, use it for its ordinary purpose, and obey laws against harassment, voyeurism, intimidation, etc. I would not require him to invent a bright-line sex/anatomy rule merely to defend not having a bathroom-assignment law—although if he were proposing an affirmative legal entitlement overriding property owners or institutional rules, a more administrable legal standard would be necessary.

4. Would expanding Analytics’s reasoning to other settings give men carte blanche to enter women’s changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports?
No. That is not a fair description of his position. Analytics explicitly says those are “separate issues”; he supports allowing sports organizations to exclude biological males from female competition, and he says prisons and shelters should make context-specific decisions. His locker-room position is more permissive and less sharply defined, but even there he discusses conduct, nudity, and privacy separately rather than asserting an unrestricted right of entry.

5. Is Analytics arguing that the word “woman” be radically redefined?
Not as a biological term. He explicitly says that when he calls a transgender woman a “woman,” he is using woman as a gender/social category, “rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female”; he simultaneously says that this does not require pretending biological sex has changed. Smac can reasonably object that this is a broadened social usageof “woman,” but Analytics is not claiming that biological males thereby become biological females.

6. In my opinion, is “the foreseeable effect of Analytics’s proposal the eradication of sex-segregated spaces”? Has Smac provided valid evidence for that view?
No, if “eradication” means that men’s and women’s facilities disappear or cease functioning as distinct spaces.Analytics’s policy would admittedly make them less than perfectly sex-exclusive under your strict biological definition, because some biological males could use women’s rooms and some biological females could use men’s rooms; but that is very different from eradicating the two-space system. Smac has provided valid evidence that offenses and privacy conflicts sometimes occur in female facilities, but he has not provided evidence establishing the much stronger causal claim that Analytics’s policy foreseeably causes sex-segregated facilities to disappear; his strongest case for that proposition is conceptual rather than empirical.

7. Which proposal is more radical? Will Analytics’s proposal lead to the eradication of sex-segregated spaces?
As a matter of government policy, I think Smac’s is more radical: it takes what historically operated largely through social convention and individual judgment and turns it into a categorical, legally enforced biological-sex rule. Analytics’s position is more revisionary if the baseline is strict biological exclusivity, but overall it leaves the familiar men’s/women’s restroom system intact and changes how difficult edge cases are handled; I do not think it foreseeably leads to the practical eradication of separate men’s and women’s spaces.

Representative quotes

• Analytics: “What is your basis for thinking that the laws you support are doing more good than harm?”

• Analytics: “The laws you support are creating real-world problems to solve a hypothetical problem. The tradeoff isn't worth it.”

• Analytics: “The limiting principle should be this: if you need to go to the bathroom, go in to the one you think is most appropriate…”

• Analytics: “Do sex-distinct facilities have value? Sure. Nobody is arguing against that.”

• Analytics: “I'd love to hear a professional psychologist explain why requiring this individual to use women's restroom would be psychologically beneficial to women and girls.”

• Analytics: “Sex-distinct restrooms in free societies have thrived for generations without laws assigning every person to a restroom according to biological sex.”

• Analytics, on locker rooms/sports/prisons: “Those are separate issues. If we want to analyze them rationally, we should treat them as separate issues.”

• Analytics, on sports: “If you are transgender and want to swim, then swim with the boys. Or don’t swim.”

• Analytics: “I was using [‘woman’] as a gender category rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female.”

• Analytics: “Your preferred solution—requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex rather than their gender expression—harms women and girls.”

• Smac: “Bathrooms will not stay in their box… there is no principled line” preventing the reasoning from reaching changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports.

• Smac: “There are documented incidents of males accessing female facilities and committing offenses.” He then provides a list of examples.

The biggest thing I think the full 14-page exchange establishes is that Smac’s characterization of Analytics as simply ignoring women and girls, opposing sex-separated spaces, refusing any limiting principle, and necessarily opening every female setting to every male is not a good description of Analytics’s actual position by the end of the discussion. Smac has serious substantive objections to Analytics’s position, some of which are legitimate policy questions, but several times he turns a disagreement with Analytics’s answer into a claim that Analytics has not answered the question at all.

Edited 3 hours ago by Analytics

[smac97]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

Sigh. You are ignoring what I say, fighting against a straw man, and making wild proposals that will harm the people you say you want to protect (i.e. woman and girls--using your definitions).

Or so it seems to me. I asked ChatGPT to look at every post in this thread and evaluate this. I’ll put the prompt in a quote box and GPT’s response below in blue.

GPT:

I read the supplied conversation from forum pages 10 through 23, including the later posts where Analytics and Smac clarify positions that were less precise earlier. I am using “women and girls” exactly as you requested: biological females, regardless of gender identity or expression.

Answers

1. Has Analytics addressed the impact of the various bathroom policies on women and girls? How much?
Yes, substantially and repeatedly. A recurring part of his argument is that a strict biological-sex rule itself harms females—particularly by requiring very male-presenting biological females to enter women’s facilities, thereby creating fear, confrontation, and privacy problems for other females. My read is broadly consistent with Calm’s later estimate that roughly one-quarter to one-third of Analytics’s posts contained explicit discussion of the impact on females, with the issue implicit in additional posts.

2. Has he argued that Smac’s proposed laws will do more harm than good to women and girls, and that this is one of the main reasons he opposes them?
Yes. Analytics repeatedly frames the issue as a harm-benefit comparison, saying Smac’s laws create “real-world problems to solve a hypothetical problem,” questioning whether they do “more good than harm,” and eventually stating expressly that the biological-sex requirement “harms women and girls.” That is clearly one major reason for his opposition, although not the only one; he also emphasizes liberty, harms to transgender people, lack of demonstrated need, and legal/constitutional concerns.

3. Does his preferred bathroom policy require the formulation of a strict “limiting principle”? If not, should he be required to articulate one?
No strict categorical limiting principle is logically required by his basic proposal, because his proposal is essentially “don’t enact a law assigning everyone to a restroom by sex.” He nevertheless eventually articulates a softer principle: use the restroom that minimizes discomfort, use it for its ordinary purpose, and obey laws against harassment, voyeurism, intimidation, etc. I would not require him to invent a bright-line sex/anatomy rule merely to defend not having a bathroom-assignment law—although if he were proposing an affirmative legal entitlement overriding property owners or institutional rules, a more administrable legal standard would be necessary.

4. Would expanding Analytics’s reasoning to other settings give men carte blanche to enter women’s changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports?
No. That is not a fair description of his position. Analytics explicitly says those are “separate issues”; he supports allowing sports organizations to exclude biological males from female competition, and he says prisons and shelters should make context-specific decisions. His locker-room position is more permissive and less sharply defined, but even there he discusses conduct, nudity, and privacy separately rather than asserting an unrestricted right of entry.

5. Is Analytics arguing that the word “woman” be radically redefined?
Not as a biological term. He explicitly says that when he calls a transgender woman a “woman,” he is using woman as a gender/social category, “rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female”; he simultaneously says that this does not require pretending biological sex has changed. Smac can reasonably object that this is a broadened social usageof “woman,” but Analytics is not claiming that biological males thereby become biological females.

6. In my opinion, is “the foreseeable effect of Analytics’s proposal the eradication of sex-segregated spaces”? Has Smac provided valid evidence for that view?
No, if “eradication” means that men’s and women’s facilities disappear or cease functioning as distinct spaces.Analytics’s policy would admittedly make them less than perfectly sex-exclusive under your strict biological definition, because some biological males could use women’s rooms and some biological females could use men’s rooms; but that is very different from eradicating the two-space system. Smac has provided valid evidence that offenses and privacy conflicts sometimes occur in female facilities, but he has not provided evidence establishing the much stronger causal claim that Analytics’s policy foreseeably causes sex-segregated facilities to disappear; his strongest case for that proposition is conceptual rather than empirical.

7. Which proposal is more radical? Will Analytics’s proposal lead to the eradication of sex-segregated spaces?
As a matter of government policy, I think Smac’s is more radical: it takes what historically operated largely through social convention and individual judgment and turns it into a categorical, legally enforced biological-sex rule. Analytics’s position is more revisionary if the baseline is strict biological exclusivity, but overall it leaves the familiar men’s/women’s restroom system intact and changes how difficult edge cases are handled; I do not think it foreseeably leads to the practical eradication of separate men’s and women’s spaces.

Representative quotes

• Analytics: “What is your basis for thinking that the laws you support are doing more good than harm?”

• Analytics: “The laws you support are creating real-world problems to solve a hypothetical problem. The tradeoff isn't worth it.”

• Analytics: “The limiting principle should be this: if you need to go to the bathroom, go in to the one you think is most appropriate…”

• Analytics: “Do sex-distinct facilities have value? Sure. Nobody is arguing against that.”

• Analytics: “I'd love to hear a professional psychologist explain why requiring this individual to use women's restroom would be psychologically beneficial to women and girls.”

• Analytics: “Sex-distinct restrooms in free societies have thrived for generations without laws assigning every person to a restroom according to biological sex.”

• Analytics, on locker rooms/sports/prisons: “Those are separate issues. If we want to analyze them rationally, we should treat them as separate issues.”

• Analytics, on sports: “If you are transgender and want to swim, then swim with the boys. Or don’t swim.”

• Analytics: “I was using [‘woman’] as a gender category rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female.”

• Analytics: “Your preferred solution—requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex rather than their gender expression—harms women and girls.”

• Smac: “Bathrooms will not stay in their box… there is no principled line” preventing the reasoning from reaching changing rooms, shelters, prisons, and sports.

• Smac: “There are documented incidents of males accessing female facilities and committing offenses.” He then provides a list of examples.

The biggest thing I think the full 14-page exchange establishes is that Smac’s characterization of Analytics as simply ignoring women and girls, opposing sex-separated spaces, refusing any limiting principle, and necessarily opening every female setting to every male is not a good description of Analytics’s actual position by the end of the discussion. Smac has serious substantive objections to Analytics’s position, some of which are legitimate policy questions, but several times he turns a disagreement with Analytics’s answer into a claim that Analytics has not answered the question at all.

I read what ChatGPT had to say.  It is, I think, a fairer account of some of your later qualifications than of the rule we have been arguing about. Those are not the same thing.

You often describe your view as “do not pass a law assigning every person a toilet by sex,” plus “use the room that minimizes discomfort,” plus “sports and prisons are separate.” ChatGPT took that package as the position and then scored my post as a straw man. The disagreement is not that you have never typed the words “women and girls.” It is that identity access plus no administrable gate / limiting principles is still the operating idea, and that idea does not stay as modest as the qualifications.

Some additional thoughts: 

What I mean by “no limiting principle”: I had thought that by now "limiting principle" would be pretty clear.  Perhaps not.  “Go where you think is most appropriate” and “don’t harass anyone” are conduct rules. They are not a rule for who belongs in the women’s bathroom. Every existing criminal law against voyeurism already applies under a sex rule too. If the permission slip into the women's bathroom is an individual's self-declared-and-not-to-be-questioned-and-entirely-subjective "identity," or even “presentation”, then the class that may enter is no longer “female.”  The class, instead, is anyone any everyone.  That is the point I keep asking you to address.

What I mean by “bathrooms will not stay in their box”L: I am not saying you personally demand Lia Thomas in the NCAA or males in women’s prisons. I am saying the legal justification and framework you use for bathroom use - "the sexed door tracks identity/expression, and a sex rule does more harm than good” - is the same justification activists and counsel can and certainly will use in those other contexts (changing rooms, sports, prisons). Calling them “separate issues” is a conversational preference. It is not a legal fence. If a school board or a court accepts the bathroom argument, they will be asked why changing rooms are different. “Because Roger said so on page 17” will not be the answer.

Whether the discussion continues under your ever-increasing outsourcing to ChatGPT, I hope you will address this.  Legal argument often arises from analogy.  By way of example: I am currently in a lawsuit about an easement.  My client's neighbor is suing her and asking the judge to impose an easement on her property under an "easement by implication" theory.  Case law in Utah is very clear that a similar but still distinguishable legal theory, "easement by prescription" requires the claimant to prove the existence of the easement by "clear and convincing evidence."  The law is similarly clear that Utah's appellate courts have not yet held that this same - and more difficult - evidentiary standard applies to "easements by implication."  In a recent motion I asked the court to made a decision on which evidentiary standard applies, "clear and convincing" or "preponderance."  My argument was to compare and analogize the evidentiary standard in Utah for prescriptive easements, and also to cite to other jurisdictions which have adopted a "clear and convincing" standards for implied easements.  Essentially, I said this: "The Utah appellate courts have not given specific guidance on this issue, but it has on prescriptive easements, which are not materially distinguishable from implied easements in that in both instances the servient estate gets an easement imposed on it against its will.  That's a pretty hefty incursion into property rights, so if 'clear and convincing' applies to prescriptive easements, it should also apply to implied ones.  Several other jurisdictions have adopted this approach..."

Another example of how analogy and comparison work in the law: 

Pierson v. Post, a New York state decision from 1805 that has become one of the most famous property law cases in American history.  Here are the facts:

Quote

Lodowick Post, a fox hunter, was chasing a fox through a vacant lot on December 10, 1802, when Pierson came across the fox and, knowing it was being chased by another, killed the fox and took it away. Post sued Pierson on an action for trespass on the case for damages against his possession of the fox. Post argued that he had ownership of the fox as giving chase to an animal in the course of hunting it was sufficient to establish possession. The trial court found in favor of Post.

On appeal after the trial, the issue put to the Supreme Court of Judicature of New York was whether one could obtain property rights to a wild animal (Ferae naturae), in this case the fox, by pursuit. The Supreme Court case was heard by Chief Justice James Kent, then one of the nation's preeminent jurists, and associate justices Daniel Tompkins (who would later become Vice President of the United States) and Henry Brockholst Livingston (who would go on to serve as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court).

Here's the majority opinion:

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If we have recourse to the ancient writers upon general principles of law, the judgment below is obviously erroneous. Justinian's Institutes, and Fleta, adopt the principle, that pursuit alone vests no property or right in the huntsman; and that even pursuit, accompanied with wounding, is equally ineffectual for that purpose, unless the animal be actually taken. The same principle is recognized by Bracton.

Puffendorf defines occupancy of beasts feræ naturæ, to be the actual corporeal possession of them, and Bynkershoeck is cited as coinciding in this definition. It is indeed with hesitation that Puffendorf affirms that a wild beast mortally wounded, or greatly maimed, cannot be fairly intercepted by another, whilst the pursuit of the person inflicting the wound continues. The foregoing authorities are decisive to show that mere pursuit gave Post no legal right to the fox, but that he became the property of Pierson, who intercepted and killed him.[Citations omitted]

Pierson ended up creating or introducing "a coherent principle on how property can be first possessed by a human being."  "Determining the rightful ownership of the fox involved the essence of the human notion of 'property' itself and how it is created, and for this reason Pierson v. Post is included in nearly all Anglo-American property casebooks."

Pierson is used to establish basic principles of property ownership for all sorts of things, including oil and natural gas (which, like the fox, is ferae naturae, and hence subject to the "Rule of Capture," which is that the person who captures the wild thing is entitled to ownership of it).

Here is why I am bringing up this case: If Pierson v. Post, an 1805 case from New York about two hunters chasing a fox, can be used by oil and gas attorneys in Houston in 2026 to make a legal point about an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, then then it is very likely that lawyers suing for men to gain access to women's changing rooms / sports / prisons will argue via analogies to bathroom access.  If the law re-defines sex-segregated bathrooms to "any man who claims the women's bathroom suits him better," then why can't that same basis be used to allow men into women's changing rooms?  Sports?  Prisons?  

You keep waiving these off as "separate issues."  They are not.  They are tightly interwoven issues, such that activist progress in one will almost certainly help activism to progress in the others.  I have a hard time believing that you are not fully aware of this, both because you are a smart fellow, and because you have ChatGPT at hand, and because I have explained the foreseeable legal reality quite a few times now.  My surmise is that ignoring it is part of the motte-and-bailey strategy.

What I mean by “eradication”: I do not mean the signs come down next Wednesday. I mean sex stops being the thing by which access to the space is differentiated.  Two doors labeled “men” and “women,” with males admitted on identity, are not sex-segregated spaces with a few hard cases. They are mixed-sex rooms that kept the old paint. ChatGPT treats that as merely a small edge-case tweak. That is the baseline motte-and-bailey trick: If the baseline for access into women's bathrooms is “whatever we have now plus self-ID,” then insisting on sex looks “radical,” and dissolving the criterion looks “conservative.”

In contrast, my baseline is that using “women” on the door means human females (women and girls). You have said you are using "woman" as a social category. That is a redefinition for purposes of the bathroom, even if you still admit the biology in a footnote.  Again, motte-and-bailey stuff at work.

On harm to women and girls: Your harm story that ChatGPT liked is mostly: a sex rule would put some passing "trans men" (male-appearing females) in the women’s room and that would scare other females. That is a real awkwardness. It is not the same problem as opening the women's bathroom door to all males, which is the natural and foreseeable result of your policy proposal. Gender-nonconforming women already have a right to that room. The rare passing trans man is a hard case. Hard cases are not a warrant to rewrite the class.

On the AI referee: A model asked to summarize your later posts will sound like you. That does not convert the summary into a finding that my concerns are imaginary. I have not ignored your answers. I have said they do not do the work you assign them.

I still think the decent shared solution is more single-occupancy rooms and a sex rule for multi-user women’s facilities—not a chatbot’s claim that the sex rule is the radical one.

If you have a limiting principle that keeps males as a class out of the women’s room without collapsing into “whoever says so,” I sure would like to see it.  However, I think we both know you will not present any such limiting principle, and I think that is because you are ideologically constrained to do so.  The second you make any concession which differentiates access by men from access by women, or which differentiates some "trans women" from other "trans women" (which is what CB is proposing), you will run afoul of ideological demands, the advocates of which will brand you a bigot.

I have previously pointed this out.  From a previous post:

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Differentiating or ranking transgender women based on their medical transition status, such as whether they have had surgeries, taken hormone replacement therapy (HRT), or transitioned at a certain age, is seen as a form of marginalization often referred to as transmedicalism or gatekeeping. Within the LGBTQ+ community and sociological discourse, creating a hierarchy based on medical intervention is widely recognized as harmful.

A summary from Google's AI:

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Why This Differentiation is Considered Bigotry

• Financial Barriers: Medical transition is highly expensive. Erasure of non-medical trans women penalizes those who cannot afford healthcare.

• Geographic and Legal Hurdles: Access to gender-affirming care varies wildly by country and state.

• Health Restrictions: Pre-existing medical conditions prevent some individuals from safely using HRT or undergoing surgery.

• Reductionist Views: Reducing womanhood strictly to medical procedures or anatomical features mimics patriarchal and essentialist definitions of gender.

• Invalidation of Identity: A person's identity is defined by their internal sense of self (gender identity), not their medical history.

Common Manifestations of This Bias

• "True" vs. "False" Transgender Ideology: The belief that only those who undergo full medical reassignment are valid.

• Passing Privilege: Weaponizing the ability to blend into cisnormative society against those who do not or cannot "pass."

• Systemic Gatekeeping: Legal or medical systems requiring unnecessary, invasive surgeries before updating gender markers on identification documents.

Moving Toward Inclusion

 

True allyship and inclusivity recognize that gender affirmation looks different for everyone. Social transition (changing names, pronouns, clothing, and hairstyles) is just as valid as medical transition. Solidarity involves fighting for the safety, autonomy, and dignity of all trans women, regardless of their medical choices or capabilities.

I appreciate you sharing your perspective on locker rooms and other places where people are actually undressed.  You would restrict those to people who have fully medically transitioned, and you would provide a private alternative. That is a real line.

It is also a form of "gatekeeping."  That is the piece I want to flag, because it sits uneasily with how this conversation has gone.

CB's proposal openly does not treat identity as sufficient. It treats identity plus medical and other steps (physician care, a year of hormones, a doctor’s declaration, a changed ID) as the price of entry. Many advocates will reject that on principle. In that framework, a “trans woman” is a woman because she says so. Requiring hormones, surgery, or paperwork is itself treated as denying her womanhood. You said you don’t particularly care that some people will object. Fair enough. But that objection is not a fringe footnote. It is the mainstream activist claim.  

You have previously described disagreement with parts of the trans movement as "bigotry."  The difficulty is that the rule you are now willing to accept would, by that same standard, put you in the same category. Distinguishing “fully transitioned” males from males who only identify as women is the differentiation I said would draw fire. If drawing that line is bigotry when I do it, it does not become something else when the line is hormones-plus-ID rather than sex.

Motte-and-bailey.  It's happening all through this thread.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 14 minutes ago by smac97