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

[webbles]

21 hours ago, Analytics said:

Women and girls have a right to be left alone. A woman shouldn't have to establish her sex to strangers simply because they think she looks masculine. Suppose someone reports her, she produces identification, and the encounter ends with an apology. She has nevertheless been scrutinized and made to justify her presence while simply using the restroom. What prevents that from happening again and again and again?

But wasn't that scrutiny always happening?  If someone before 2013 walked into a bathroom and didn't look correct for that bathroom, didn't people scrutinize them?  I've accidentally walked into women's bathrooms and I was definitely scrutinized and even mocked by the girls in there.  If you look too feminine in a male bathroom or too masculine in a female bathroom, people will react to it.  I've heard of people going to the employees and telling them that someone of the wrong gender is in a bathroom.  So, I think people have always had to establish their sex.  That was the norm of society.

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, webbles said:

But wasn't that scrutiny always happening?  If someone before 2013 walked into a bathroom and didn't look correct for that bathroom, didn't people scrutinize them?  I've accidentally walked into women's bathrooms and I was definitely scrutinized and even mocked by the girls in there.  If you look too feminine in a male bathroom or too masculine in a female bathroom, people will react to it.  I've heard of people going to the employees and telling them that someone of the wrong gender is in a bathroom.  So, I think people have always had to establish their sex.  That was the norm of society.

I'm not so sure, and that type of behavior isn’t exactly what I was talking about. Here is all of my personal experience.

Once, my wife was having a birthday party at a busy bar/restaurant. This was about 15 years ago. One of our guests grabbed my arm and said, “Analytics! You’ve got to see this!” She then proceeded to try and drag me into the women’s restroom. I refused to go, but she absolutely insisted and refused to give up. Finally so as to not make a scene, I reluctantly followed her in. Everybody stopped what they were doing and look at me. My host said, “It’s all right everyone! He’s with me!” With that, everybody exhaled and ignored me. She showed me there was a whiteboard in the restroom, and somebody had drawn an extravagant birthday message for my wife. I spent a tenth of a second admiring it, and got the heck out.

Perhaps 5 years ago, I was at a crowded downtown venue, and there was a very long line for the women’s room, and a very short line for the men’s. A woman who was an unambiguously cisgender woman got into the short line for the men’s room. She waited her turn, used the toilet, washed her hands, and got out. Everybody there felt quite uncomfortable, but everyone very deliberately ignored her.

About a year after that, I was in exactly the same situation, but this time a woman asked me for permission to use the men’s room, because she had to go very badly and couldn’t wait in the women’s line. I gave her permission to use the toilet. She went in, took care of business, and got out. Again, everyone ignored her.

Likewise, when Lily Contino used the women’s restroom in Disneyworld, everyone politely ignored her and nobody made a stink about it until her videos went viral, and even then, the main objection was her videoing other people in the restroom and not her presence there.

Compare that to the videos Smac collects that show people whipping out there cellphones and recording themselves saying, “I just saw a tranny go into the women’s restroom, and I’m going to confront them on video when they come out!” One person in his collection actually flew across the Atlantic Ocean in order to generate this type of content, and when she got impatient waiting for the person she was stalking to use the restroom, decided to confront her in a hallway with the accusatory question, “You’re a man! What bathroom to you use???!!!!”  That isn’t healthy.

[smac97]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Again: I am asking you to say, in a sentence that could go in a policy, which males are out.  This is what you are steadfastly refusing to do. 

Again: The question remains which rule does that, and who counts as the women and girls in the tally. That is the argument, and you are evading important elements of it.

Again: “Don’t pass a law unless there is a need, and don’t let it do more harm than good” is not a criterion for who the class is. It is a reason to regulate less. Applied to a women’s prison or a girls’ locker room, it can just as easily mean “don’t pass a sex law” as “don’t pass an identity entitlement.” You still have to say which males are out.

Again: The natural and foreseeable effect of your proposal is the elimination, either de facto or de jure or both, of sex-segregated spaces.  

I am not asking about analysis of whether biological women and girls will be harmed by your policy.  I am, instead, asking you to explain your policy in the first instance.

• Under your policy, who is the "class" of persons that can access women's bathrooms?
• Under your policy, which males are to be excluded from women's bathrooms?  
• Under your policy, who counts as "women" and "girls" for the purposes of gaining access to women's bathrooms?  Is it "anyone who identifies as a 'woman' or a 'girl?'"
• Do you dispute that the natural and foreseeable effect of your proposal is the elimination, either de facto or de jure or both, of sex-segregated spaces?

Smac, I favor people ordinarily using the restroom corresponding to their gender identity and making that decision themselves. That includes transgender women who are biologically male, without requiring them to prove their sincerity or look sufficiently feminine.

We are making some progress.  I am glad of that.

I asked: "Under your policy, who is the 'class' of persons that can access women's bathrooms?"  You sort of answer that above: "People ordinarily using the restroom corresponding to their gender identity and making that decision themselves."

You also sort of answer this one: "Under your policy, who counts as 'women' and 'girls' for the purposes of gaining access to women's bathrooms?  Is it "anyone who identifies as a 'woman' or a 'girl?'"  Your kinda/sort answer: "That includes transgender women who are biologically male."

Okay, but does your proposal exclude any males?  It seems like it does not, as all anyone has to do to gain entry is think "I 'identify' as a woman."  Do you acknowledge this?

Under your policy, which males are to be excluded from women's bathrooms?  

Do you dispute that the natural and foreseeable effect of your proposal is the elimination, either de facto or de jure or both, of sex-segregated spaces?

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

I understand that my approach doesn’t preserve an exclusively female admission rule.

So when I ask "Do you dispute that the natural and foreseeable effect of your proposal is the elimination, either de facto or de jure or both, of sex-segregated spaces?", and when you obliquely respond with "my approach doesn’t preserve an exclusively female admission rule," can I take your answer as, effectively, "Yes, I acknowledge that my proposal amounts to the elimination, either de facto or de jure or both, of sex-segregated spaces."?

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

You say your rule can be enforced through rare, fact-specific complaints. Suppose a patron reports that someone washing her hands looks male. What additional evidence, if any, would justify intervention, and how would staff establish that person’s sex?

I agree that people should be able to use a restroom without being inspected, photographed, or shamed for how they look. I also agree that circulating videos of confrontations can train people to treat every ambiguous stranger as a suspect. That isn’t the culture I want. Women and girls should be left alone. So should people who are just trying to wash their hands.

Where we differ is what the room is for.

I think sex-separated restrooms exist because the two sexes have different bodies, different patterns of sexual offending, and a long-settled expectation of privacy and propriety and decorum regarding spaces where women are in a state of partial undress or otherwise in need of a space providing privacy, propriety and decorum.

Gender identity does not change those facts. A policy of “whoever decides they belong here belongs here” is not a modest extension of grace. It is a profound and fundamental change in the admission rule from sex to self-description.

You are right that my rule does not preserve an appearance-exclusive women’s room. It isn’t trying to. It preserves a sex-exclusive one. That means some females who have beards, flat chests, and masculine clothing would use the women’s room, just as some butch women already do. Encountering someone who “looks male” would not, by itself, prove the rule was broken. I accept that cost. The alternative cost is that any male who claims a female identity — or who is willing to say he does (or even sillently think to himself that he does) — has a standing invitation to go into women's bathrooms. You note that someone could abuse discretion. Under self-ID, abuse is not a loophole. It is the rule operating as written.

I don’t think the possibility of abuse “doesn’t establish” anything. It is the reason we have locks, stalls, and sex designations in the first place. We already reject “most people will behave” as a sufficient reason to make locker rooms, showers, shelters, and prisons mixed-sex. Bathrooms are the same kind of space, only more common.

Regarding enforcement: I do not want staff or patrons running a femininity test at the sink. A report that “someone washing her hands looks male” is not enough. I would treat it the way we already treat other low-information complaints. Staff can look for conduct: lingering without using a fixture, filming, peering under or over stalls, following a particular person, exposing genitals, or refusing to leave a stall when asked in a way that suggests they are not there to use the toilet. Sex is established the same way it is established everywhere else we still care about it—birth records, medical history, or, in the rare contested case, the same kinds of facts courts already use. Day to day, almost none of that happens. Most people self-sort. The point of a sex rule is not constant policing. It is that when there is a problem, the institution is allowed to say “this space is for females” without first litigating someone’s identity.

I also think we should build more single-occupancy rooms. That is the cleanest way to give masculine-looking females, dysphoric males, and anyone who just wants a door that locks a place to go without converting the multi-stall women’s room into a mixed-sex space.

You favor ordinary grace plus intervention after harassment. I favor ordinary grace inside a sex-based boundary, plus intervention after harassment. The disagreement is whether the boundary itself is worth keeping. I think it is, including for girls who cannot be expected to sort “sincere transgender woman” from “male who wants access,” and including for women whose discomfort is not a character flaw. Leaving people quietly alone is easier when the room still means what the sign says.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited Thursday at 04:39 PM by smac97

[webbles]

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I'm not so sure, and that type of behavior isn’t exactly what I was talking about. Here is all of my personal experience.

Once, my wife was having a birthday party at a busy bar/restaurant. This was about 15 years ago. One of our guests grabbed my arm and said, “Analytics! You’ve got to see this!” She then proceeded to try and drag me into the women’s restroom. I refused to go, but she absolutely insisted and refused to give up. Finally so as to not make a scene, I reluctantly followed her in. Everybody stopped what they were doing and look at me. My host said, “It’s all right everyone! He’s with me!” With that, everybody exhaled and ignored me. She showed me there was a whiteboard in the restroom, and somebody had drawn an extravagant birthday message for my wife. I spent a tenth of a second admiring it, and got the heck out.

Perhaps 5 years ago, I was at a crowded downtown venue, and there was a very long line for the women’s room, and a very short line for the men’s. A woman who was an unambiguously cisgender woman got into the short line for the men’s room. She waited her turn, used the toilet, washed her hands, and got out. Everybody there felt quite uncomfortable, but everyone very deliberately ignored her.

About a year after that, I was in exactly the same situation, but this time a woman asked me for permission to use the men’s room, because she had to go very badly and couldn’t wait in the women’s line. I gave her permission to use the toilet. She went in, took care of business, and got out. Again, everyone ignored her.

Likewise, when Lily Contino used the women’s restroom in Disneyworld, everyone politely ignored her and nobody made a stink about it until her videos went viral, and even then, the main objection was her videoing other people in the restroom and not her presence there.

Compare that to the videos Smac collects that show people whipping out there cellphones and recording themselves saying, “I just saw a tranny go into the women’s restroom, and I’m going to confront them on video when they come out!” One person in his collection actually flew across the Atlantic Ocean in order to generate this type of content, and when she got impatient waiting for the person she was stalking to use the restroom, decided to confront her in a hallway with the accusatory question, “You’re a man! What bathroom to you use???!!!!”  That isn’t healthy.

The behavior from your personal experience seems to match what I'm talking about.

The first one, the women definitely scrutinized you.  And probably would have asked you to leave or at least been very worried about you.  But then a woman announced that you were with her and they felt better because there was someone escourting you.

The second one, the men scrutinized the woman but accepted the situation because of the long line.  If there hadn't been a long line, there might have been some more interaction.

The third one, the woman knew she was crossing the rules and so asked for permission.  Similar to the first one, because she had permission, no further interaction.

So, scrutiny is happening.  And, if the situation warrants it, they might not do anything further.  But they might escalate it.  We've had lawsuits that go all the way to state supreme courts on whether people can go in bathrooms and this is before 2013 and before any bathroom laws (in either direction) were implemented.  There was a cultural rule that you went to the bathroom you were supposed to go to.  If you didn't, you would be scrutinized, told to leave, harassed, or even arrested.  It is why transgender fought for the right to go into the bathroom of their choice.  Previously, they didn't have that and could be denied a bathroom.

[smac97]

9 hours ago, webbles said:

But wasn't that scrutiny always happening?  If someone before 2013 walked into a bathroom and didn't look correct for that bathroom, didn't people scrutinize them?  I've accidentally walked into women's bathrooms and I was definitely scrutinized and even mocked by the girls in there.  If you look too feminine in a male bathroom or too masculine in a female bathroom, people will react to it.  I've heard of people going to the employees and telling them that someone of the wrong gender is in a bathroom.  So, I think people have always had to establish their sex.  That was the norm of society.

And it would happen regardless of whether "sex" or "gender identity" is the ticket for entry into women's bathrooms.

The difference, though, is that Roger's proposal, if enacted, would eliminate, either on a de facto or de jure basis, sex-segregated spaces.  Women and girls would then have no basis, legal or otherwise, to "scrutinize" anyone.  They would, instead, be compelled to put up with men in women's bathrooms.  No legal recourse whatsoever.  And I would also anticipate that the number of instances of men going into women's bathrooms would increase by a lot.  

And it gets worse.  Much worse.

I worked with Grok in terms of formulating plausible legal issues arising from the “whoever decides they belong here belongs here” approach.  The results were grim, for society in general but particularly for those poor souls at the very bottom of the pecking order created in Roger's proposal: women and girls.

(I've tweaked Grok's response a bit here and there) :

Quote

A “whoever decides they belong here belongs here” rule does not merely add a few extra users to an intact women’s room. It changes what the sign means. Once admission is self-description rather than sex, the space is no longer sex-segregated, either de jure (the written rule) or de facto (nobody will tell a male to leave). Title IX regs, workplace privacy norms, voyeurism statutes, and “reasonable expectation of privacy” analysis all grew up around female-only occupancy. Self-ID does not repeal those texts. It makes them internally inconsistent.

Bostock held that firing someone for being transgender is sex discrimination under Title VII. It expressly reserved bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes. Lower courts and agencies then split. Some extended Bostock to facility access. Others, and the current EEOC in the federal-sector setting, have held that Title VII still permits single-sex intimate spaces.

Employers do not wait for the Supreme Court. They write the policy they think survives the next complaint and reduces the risks of litigation.  And in doing so, those policies could become fairly draconian against women and girls. 

Some examples:

Workplace. Female employee finds a male coworker in the marked women’s room and asks him to leave. Under self-ID that request can be recast as sex discrimination against a transgender employee, gender-identity harassment under state or local law, or a hostile environment if the request is repeated or accompanied by “misgendering.” HR’s incentive is obvious. The identity charge is easy to plead. The woman’s charge requires a court to say “woman” still means adult human female. The risk-averse move is to treat the woman's request as the problem.  Women and girls lose.

A policy that “questioning another employee’s identity or facility use is harassment” converts a privacy objection into a code-of-conduct violation: write-up, training, gag order, or termination. She then has her own Title VII or state claims—sex discrimination (female-only privacy withdrawn from females), retaliation, hostile environment, constructive discharge. Ames (2025) removed the extra burden some circuits had imposed on majority-group Title VII plaintiffs. Both sides can sue, so the employer polices the cheaper side: the woman, ex ante.  Women and girls lose.

The corporation’s rational response is prior restraint. Forbid speculation about a coworker’s sex. Frame discomfort as bias and, if expressed, harassment. Handle a complaint about a male in the women’s room as a complaint against the complainant (mostly women) unless there is independent evidence of voyeurism or assault. Offer the objecting woman a single-occupancy room “as an accommodation,” which concedes the multi-stall room is no longer female (and imagine the lines that women will form for that single-occupancy room once it becomes the only place they can use the bathroom without men around, so women and girls lose here as well). In union and public-sector shops add grievances both ways, Pickering speech issues, and religious-accommodation / RFRA claims if employees are ordered to affirm the identity or stay silent.

Public accommodations. Replace HR with a store manager, gym, or park district. Still a lose-lose proposition for the entity managing the bathrooms.  Staff face an identity-based public-accommodations claim if they remove the male, and a sex-discrimination or deceptive-practices claim from women if the facility advertised a women’s room and then ran it mixed. In identity-first states the business may be forbidden to ask him to leave; the woman’s request becomes the event the business must punish. Women and girls must not only accept men in their bathrooms, they must also remain utterly silent about it.  Women and girls lose.

Schools. Same two-way Title IX / equal-protection fight, plus parents, records, and concealment of social transition. The sports cases treat Title IX “sex” as biological sex; that supports sex-separated facilities but is not a bathroom holding. Administrators typically silence girls and parents first.  Girls and women lose a lot here.

Criminal and privacy law. Voyeurism, exposure, and trespass still exist. Self-ID changes when staff will invoke them. A male washing his hands and leaving has committed no crime and, under the policy, no actionable violation (and many non-physical violations, such as the man leering/looking at the women in the bathroom, would likely be quite difficult to prosecute). In contrast, the woman or girl who objects has committed a violation. Staff, trained that “looking male is not evidence,” wait for a second fact. If the owner has announced that males who identify as women may be present, a later privacy or negligent-security claim is easier to defend: she was on notice the space was mixed.  Women can submit to men in what-were-previously-women's spaces or take their bathroom business to a single-occupancy bathroom (if there is one available) or to other facilities, though these other places would likely also allow men in women's spaces, thus affording no real solution to women and girls.

Why volume and silencing arrive together

Actor	If self-ID is the rule	If sex is the rule
Male identifying as woman, excluded or asked to leave	Title VII / state GI / public-accommodations claim	Usually loses on facilities if sex is biological; may still have a status claim if fired for being trans
Female who objects	Disciplined; sex-discrimination, retaliation, hostile environment	Request is consistent with policy
Employer / school / city	Sued either way; buys peace by gagging the female objection	Sued by identity plaintiffs

 

 

Insurers and boards demand identity-access policies.

Single-occupancy rooms, and all the costs associated with them, to be borne by private property owners and taxpayers, proliferate.

Women with religious or trauma-based objections are removed from the common facility.

Male employees learn that claiming the identity is a complete defense to being asked to leave.

Self-ID is not federal bathroom law nationwide. A woman asking a stranger to leave a public restroom is not, by itself, a Title VII violation. It becomes an employment or public-accommodations problem when they share an employer or a statute treats the request as denial of service. Pure self-ID, with no misconduct trigger and no sex-based default, is what collapses the category.

Women and girls are losing all over the place.  Bigly.

Prisons and jails. Same structure, no exit, higher violence. Identity placement puts males into women’s housing and showers. Female prisoners have Eighth Amendment, equal-protection, and PREA theories. Identity claimants have Eighth Amendment theories the other way if housed with men. Courts are already issuing conflicting injunctions. Strip searches cannot follow both rules at once.  In the end, there will be men being housed with women in prisons, and the latter group has no say in the matter.  Women lose.

Shelters and HUD housing. A women’s refuge exists because the threat is typically male. Identity as a funding or human-rights condition means staff cannot treat an individual being as disqualifying. Women who object are “creating an unsafe environment.” HUD’s 2016 Equal Access Rule pushed identity placement in shared sleeping and bathing space; federal enforcement of that rule has been halted, but many state and city laws still require it. Operators go mixed-sex and stop calling the building a women’s shelter.  Women and girls lose.

Medicine and records. Charting a male as “female” to match identity creates wrong-sex defaults in labs, dosing, and rooming. A nurse who uses accurate sex language can be disciplined or fired; a female patient who objects can be labeled uncooperative. Informed-consent and battery theories arise if a woman is examined on the premise that no male is present. Death certificates and crime statistics that follow identity rather than sex degrade the records later used in litigation. Licensing boards can treat accurate sex language as unprofessional conduct — yet another career-ending track.

Religious organizations. Sex-based rooms trigger public-accommodations suits and RFRA / ministerial-exception defenses. Cities that condition permits or grants on identity access turn a bathroom rule into an unconstitutional-conditions fight.

Family law and parents. School restroom access is often the first official act of a social transition. Parents who object get fitness fights. Custody evaluators treat a sex-realist view as evidence against the parent.

Evidence and defamation. “That is a man in the women’s room,” said to HR or posted, is pleaded as harassment or defamation in identity-first jurisdictions even when biologically true. Video of the encounter is both proof and a separate tort. Discovery swallows Slack and badge data. Criminal defendants will test identity as a housing or classification argument.

Insurance and premises liability. A sexual-assault claim in a “women’s” locker room becomes a notice-and-security case: did the occupier create the risk by policy? The occupier’s defense is civil-rights compliance. That defense can fail against the woman and succeed against the identity claimant in the same building. EPLI and D&O costs rise because both theories are covered claims.

Gyms, pools, membership spaces. Self-ID collapses “women’s hours” and “female changing” into marketing. Female members cancel and sue for deceptive trade practices. Denied males sue under public-accommodations law.

Grants and audits. Title IX, VAWA, PREA, and Clery all count sex. Recoding males as female falsifies the audit trail. Recipients then face grant-compliance or False Claims exposure for certifying sex-separated facilities they no longer operate—or civil-rights exposure for operating them. Compliance officers delete sex from the form. The category disappears on paper after it has already disappeared in the room.

The pattern in every setting: 

• (1) The identity claimant sues for exclusion or “misgendering.”
• (2) The female occupant sues for loss of a sex-separated space, assault, or retaliation.
• (3) The employee who described sex accurately sues for compelled speech, religion, or sex discrimination.
• (4) The institution’s cheap move is to gag (3) and hope (1) and (2) settle.

Once admission is a mental state, the only administrable enforcement tool left is speech control. You cannot verify identity without investigating sex. You cannot investigate sex without the scrutiny self-ID forbids. So institutions forbid the question. The room stays marked “Women.” The operative rule becomes: do not say that the man does not belong.

Legally speaking, none of these consequences are obscure or opaque or farfetched.  They are, instead, readily foreseeable.  I have to think that this is readily apparent to attorneys representing trans advocacy interests.  

And while Roger is not an attorney, he is a very smart guy.  And his ongoing failure/refusal to articulate any limiting principles to his proposal suggests, to me, that he is likewise aware of at least some of these likely ramifications.

Consequently, I see this is an intentional and deliberate and large scale motte-and-bailey strategy.  These outcomes are not surprises that advocacy groups and their lawyers just stumbled into. They are the ordinary consequences of the rule they ask courts and employers to adopt. People who litigate and draft statutes for a living are charged with seeing those consequences. When they refuse to address them except as “fearmongering,” that is not ignorance. It is a choice.

Foreseeability is the job.

A competent civil-rights lawyer, asked to replace "sex" with "self-described identity" as the admission rule for toilets, locker rooms, shelters, wards, and prisons, can forecast the ramifications in an afternoon:

• The women’s room ceases to be female-only.
• A coworker who objects becomes the disciplinary problem.
• HR gags speech because speech is the only remaining enforcement tool.
• Female prisoners and shelter residents face male bodies in spaces built around male-pattern risk.
• Medical charts and crime statistics break.
• Two plaintiff classes form and the institution silences the cheaper one.

None of that requires a novel theory of harm. It is how categories work. If the criterion is no longer sex, sex-separated institutions do not survive as sex-separated institutions. Counsel who file class complaints demanding identity access to “common restrooms” and rejecting single-user alternatives as insufficient are not asking for courtesy at the sink. They are asking that the sex classification itself be treated as unlawful.

They also know the appearance problem they use as a shield. They say a sex rule would send bearded females into the women’s room and invite scrutiny of butch women. That is an argument they deploy (as Roger has in this thread). This, in my view, proves they have mapped enforcement, mismatch, and social cost. They simply assign those costs to the sex rule and the (former) principal beneficiaries of them (women and girls), and assign none to self-ID—except “someone could abuse discretion,” which they then dismiss. Abuse without a screen is not an unforeseen loophole. It is the rule they wrote.

Silence is evidence of awareness, not the opposite.

If the cascade were genuinely unexpected, the briefs would contain limiting principles (principles which Roger has, again and again and again, failed/refused to articulate) : sincerity findings, surgical or legal-sex conditions, misconduct triggers, preservation of female-only prisons and refuges, no discipline for stating sex, single-occupancy as a complete remedy.

The standard ask is the opposite. No proof. No appearance test. No “reasonable belief” defense for the woman who objects.

Single-user rooms become rejected as "segregation" and discriminatory (yeesh, women and girls simply cannot catch a break under Roger's proposal). Sex-based placement in prison and shelter is treated as discrimination. Accurate sex language is treated as harassment. Compelled speech.  Punished speech. Legions of new grounds for lawsuits.  

This package is what we get when the loss of the female-only boundary is acceptable—or intended—and the remaining problem is people who keep naming sex.

Calling documented mechanisms “narratives” or “fearmongering” will be the tell (oh, and "Bigot!", as Roger has done in this thread). You do not need to disprove a consequence you have not foreseen. You need to disprove it when you have foreseen it and still want the rule.

Motte and bailey.

The motte is the modest claim offered to a general audience and advanced by Roger in this thread: Everyone has to pee; do not inspect strangers; intervene only for voyeurism or assault; sharing a video of a confrontation encourages vigilantism; grace is better than policing. That motte is psychologically cheap and partly true. No serious person wants bathroom sting operations.

The bailey is the legal demand that will actually be filed and lobbied: Gender identity is sex for purposes of Title VII, Title IX, public accommodations, housing, and prisons; exclusion from the opposite-sex facility is sex discrimination; an employer may not cabin a trans-identifying employee in a single-user room; a women’s shelter or prison that houses by sex is engaged in a civil-rights violation; objecting speech is harassment. On the bailey, a female-only room is not a legitimate aim that must be balanced. It is the injury.

The move is familiar. Defend the bailey with the motte, as I suspect Roger will do when the time comes.

And when asked what happens to women who do not want males in the room, advocates such as Roger will retreat "grace," dignity, rarity of crime, the ugliness of confrontation, and so on.

When writing the ordinance or the complaint, return to the bailey and treat any sex-based line as illegal.

The two positions being debated here (my sex-based proposal and Roger's "anyone who wants to go in" proposal) are qualitatively difference.  The latter is not the same policy as the former, but described kindly. One preserves a sex classification and asks for decency in administering it. The other abolishes the classification, a point I have noted repeatedly, and which point Roger has really not addressed.  And this other proposal needs the motte so the abolition does not have to be said out loud.

Feature, not bug.

If “trans women are women” is a definitional claim rather than a courtesy, then a space that excludes males by definition excludes some people the movement defines as women. The sex-separated room is then not a hardship to be mitigated with a third space. It is a standing insult to the definition. That is why third spaces are so often rejected, why “passing” is disclaimed as a requirement, and why the same theory is applied without a break from the office toilet to the refuge to the prison. A bug would be patched with limits. A feature is rolled out across every institution that still uses sex.

All of this is intentional and foreseeable.

Indifference to the female costs follows from the same definition. If the person in the room is already classified as a woman, the woman who objects is not protecting a sex class. She is attacking a member of that class. Her foreseeably being disciplined, silenced, or told to use the side room is, on that view, correct enforcement. Advocacy organizations and their lawyers are not failing to see that. They are treating it as the system working.

All of this is also intentional and foreseeable.  The costs to women and girls just don't matter.

We can grant every good-faith motive at the individual level (gender dysphoria is real; public humiliation is cruel; most people just want to use the toilet, etc.) and still hold the institutional actors to the rule they are actually seeking. They are sophisticated enough to know that self-ID does not leave sex-segregated spaces standing and then quietly used. That is why they fight the standing, not the etiquette.  That is why the motte-and-bailey stuff is so widespread.  That is why these outcomes are intended as features, not bugs, of proposals such as Roger's.  That is why these outcomes are being ignored or diminished, and why those expressing concerns about those outcomes are slandered as "Bigots!" (as Roger has done in this thread).

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited Thursday at 11:01 PM by smac97

[Analytics]

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

That is why these outcomes are intended as features, not bugs, of proposals such as Roger’s....  

Smac, I’m done.

Your motte-and-bailey accusation goes well beyond saying my proposal would have harmful consequences. You are accusing me of knowingly pursuing a broader agenda, treating its harmful consequences as intended features, and concealing it behind a more defensible position. That is an accusation of both dishonesty and malicious intent.

And a central piece of your evidence is that I’m a smart guy. Apparently, I’m too smart to honestly disagree with your predictions, so I must secretly know you’re right. As if your confidence in your conclusions is evidence of my dishonesty.

I’ve explained why restrooms need not have the same rules as prisons, shelters, or sports. You treat those distinctions as camouflage. If I explain myself, I’m defending the motte. If I deny your accusation, I’m retreating to it. What could I possibly say that you wouldn’t interpret as further concealment?

You said you were working to improve your conversations by following Steven Collis’s Habits of a Peacemaker. You specifically highlighted resisting the temptation to caricature another person’s position. How does assigning me a malicious agenda, then dismissing my stated beliefs as a cover story, put that into practice? That is an extraordinarily cynical way to treat someone who has spent weeks explaining himself to you.

Your catastrophe analysis fails to engage with the Massachusetts evidence we’ve discussed. It doesn’t settle everything, but a long list of things that hypothetically could go wrong doesn't change the evidence about what actually happened when we allowed manly-looking people to use the women’s restroom rather than forcing them into the women’s as you want the law to do.

I’ve been sincerely trying to explain my point of view. You’ve chosen to treat those explanations as concealment of something sinister. There’s no productive conversation left under those terms.

Edited Friday at 03:15 PM by Analytics

[smac97]

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

Smac, I’m done.

Your motte-and-bailey accusation goes well beyond saying my proposal would have harmful consequences.  

Perhaps I have assumed too much.

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

You are accusing me of knowingly pursuing a broader agenda, treating its harmful consequences as intended features, and concealing it behind a more defensible position. That is an accusation of both dishonesty and malicious intent.

I have been working on avoiding such accusations.  I have apparently failed.  I think the endless accusations of "Bigot!" from folks like you and SU are not so much offensive (they've long since lost whatever rhetorical potency they may have had) as they are - to me - indicative of you following some sort of informal advocacy playbook (present men in women's spaces as something naturally correct, refuse to identify any limiting principles, refuse to address adverse consequences for women and girls, refuse to address - or even outright deny - the foreseeable legal and social consequences of the proposal (including the eradication of sex-segregated spaces), etc.).  Hence the inference that your comments in this thread have intentionally been aligned with what I see as motte-and-bailey tactics which I have been observing for years.

I think "subversive" intent is perhaps the more accurate term.  I am willing to grant that advocates of this approach sincerely think of themselves as being on the side of the angels.  As George R.R. Martin has observed: “Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.”

Having observed legal and social developments along these lines for many years (and presupposing that others, such as yourself, have done likewise), I have concluded that the motte-and-bailey strategy is precisely what is going on in some circles of of trans advocacy groups and individuals.  The strategy and tactics and terminology, together with the obfuscations and evasions and failure/refusal to identify any limiting principles and near-total disregard for the interests of women and girls (for whom these spaces have always been intended), have materially contributed to this conclusion.  I admit that it's my personal view, but it seems warranted, both because of some public statements from trans advocates and because the near total failure/refusal to address the foreseeable consequences of this proposal (which is generally presented as a demand, not a request) more or less compels such an inference.

As to public statements, see this article by GLAAD (under the header "Legislation") :

Fact Sheet: Misleading Narratives About Transgender People and Restrooms, Locker Rooms, and Other Single-Sex Spaces

This fact sheet on “restrooms, locker rooms, and other single-sex spaces” puts toilets in the same paragraph as sports restrictions, identity documents, and prison placement. It quotes the ACLU: transgender people should be allowed to “use facilities and participate in activities that match who they are,” and that this is “legally required by statutory and constitutional bans on sex discrimination.” That is a central principle covering facilities and activities.  The article does not even bother to articulate a justification for males going into these spaces, and instead treats such entry as axiomatic, as a foregone conclusion, and any opposition to such entry as outrageous and beyond the pale.  No treatment at all of the rights of women and girls to sex-segregated spaces.

The ACLU’s long-published know-your-rights materials had already treated school restrooms, locker rooms, and sports eligibility as the same Title IX/gender-identity package, and said gender-neutral toilets are not an adequate substitute for using the facility that matches identity.

To some extent, my conclusion about the motte-and-bailey tactic may be outdated.  The Obama Administration's 2016 "Dear Colleague" letter shows that this strategy has been in place for at least the last ten years (thus making it less secretive than it is, but also demonstrating how profoundly subversive it is). It is the cleanest official statement of the theory: a student’s “gender identity” is the student’s “sex” for school facilities. Once that reading is accepted, locker rooms follow bathrooms; sports follow locker rooms unless a separate carve-out is written. That letter shows that the the interlinking of these topics - bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons - was policy, and was no longer a hidden strategy.   From the above link:

Quote

In May 2016, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, together with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to schools and colleges nationwide “summariz[ing] a school’s Title IX obligations regarding transgender students.” The letter announced that in interpreting Title IX, the two federal agencies “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex.” To comply with their Title IX obligations under this interpretation of the law—and to be eligible for federal funding—schools would have to allow students access to all sex-segregated facilities and activities (with the partial exception of single-sex sports teams) “consistent with their gender identity” (US Department of Justice 2016).

The Dear Colleague letter marked the end of the phase of quiet, behind-the-scenes institutional embedding of gender identity in the administrative sphere. Its nationwide reach, coupled with the threat of powerful sanctions, provoked widespread opposition. The first Trump administration revoked the letter; the Biden administration reasserted the principle of treating gender identity as sex in interpreting Title IX; and the new Trump administration once again repudiated that principle.²⁵ Meanwhile, court cases concerning transgender students’ access to bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity have been accumulating, and federal circuit courts have split on the issue. Since Bostock, courts have also split on the applicability of that decision to other questions (especially access to sex-segregated activities and facilities) and to domains beyond employment. The circuit split makes it likely that the Supreme Court will intervene to resolve the dispute (Degler 2022).

The entire article is worth a read, particularly the section titled "The Quiet Revolution."  After tracing how “gender identity” got into medicine, law, administration, statistics, and schools, the author names what those changes added up to.

In a short span, institutions installed a new “principle of vision and division” of social life. Gender identity began to compete with, redefine, or displace sex. Because sex is among the most basic organizing categories there are, that is a large change. It happened with almost no public fight and little public notice until about 2015. That combination — structural change plus low visibility — is why he calls it a quiet revolution

The strategy was intentionally quiet and subversive from the get.  The author analogizes it to John Skrentny’s “minority rights revolution”: rights expanded less through mass protest than through insiders — agencies, courts, professional bodies, HR offices — reinterpreting old statutes and stacking small rules. Change was incremental, cross-referencing, and often shielded from voters. “Institutional leapfrogging” and a “politics of alignment” let each domain treat the last domain’s policy as settled fact. Fortune 500 nondiscrimination clauses, medical guidelines, data categories, and school policies cited one another. The 2016 Title IX Dear Colleague letter, telling schools that "identity" is "sex" for the purposes of access to women's facilities, became the public capstone of that private process, not its start.

While the category was treated as a private, self-regarding fact, almost no one objected. Once it became actionable — something a child or adult could use to demand medical transition or entry to sex-separated spaces and sports — other people’s interests came into view: women’s privacy and safety, athletes’ fairness, parents’ concern about irreversible treatment. That is when the quiet phase ended and the loud one began. The revolution, then, was not a conspiracy so much as a category that outgrew the niches in which it had been planted.

The above article (published in 2025) is, I admit, not fully congruent with my surmise.  The author's articulation about the mechanism is different from mine: first, the category was institutionalized without a public mandate; second, the controversy arrived late, when the category started reallocating other people’s spaces, sports, and children’s medical care.

However, my conclusion is, I think, also plausible.

• The pre-2015 path was quieter than a civil-rights march: guidance letters, settlement agreements, Fortune 500 alignment, medical SOC updates. This is all documented.
• After the "Dear Colleague" letter, state bills, Gloucester, sports cases, and European medical reversals, the public cost of the explicit claim rose. Some institutions responded by softening slogans (“inclusion,” “best practice,” “case by case”) while keeping identity-as-sex in handbooks.
• This progression looks like tactical quiet after exposure (IOW, motte-and-bailey). The article's author would more likely call it the old embedding machine still running in places the election does not reach.

The movement, as a whole, saw the national and local backlash, decided a return to the quietly subversive motte-and-bailey approach was a better national strategy.  

As to the foreseeability aspect of all this, it has been - for me - one of the more potent indicators of subversive intent.  The social and legal ramifications of the overall proposal, particularly the cross-pollenization (policy on bathrooms affects policy on locker rooms, sports, etc. and vice versa) and the eradication of sex-segregated spaces and the problematic impositions on the rights of women and girls, have been obvious for years, and yet the proposal's advocates pretty much always ignore them.  Refuse to acknowledge them in any way.  Act as if they don't exist. Act as if the proposal is axiomatically correct and justified.  Accuse anyone who raises concerns about these consequences of bigotry.  And so on.

Sound pretty familiar.  Sounds like what has been going on in this thread.  Right down to the various and repeated accusations of "bigotry" ("I can’t help but wonder whether the real problem is them and involves something that rhymes with spigotry").

1. Present a "proposal" that is facially controversial and subversive ("Women's bathrooms should be open to men who 'identify' as women"), and act as if it is not, and that it is instead the moral and right thing to do.  Ipso facto, anyone who disagrees with it is a bigot.
2. Refuse to identify any limiting principles.  Both because broadly-accepted tenets of trans ideology categorically reject any such limitations, and because any such limitations will almost immediately expose the real-world adverse ramifications of what is being presented as innocuous and harmless to everyone (except "bigots" - that is, anyone who questions or disagrees with the proposal).
3. Refuse to address the foreseeable consequences.  The eradication of sex-segregated spaces.  The massive impositions on women and girls, the very people for whom such spaces were created.  The avalanche of lawsuits and necessary upheavals to and profound reordering of workplaces, public spaces, schools, physical facilities, religious organizations and properties, and so on.  These things just don't exist.  They don't matter.  They need not be addressed.  And anyone who raises them as a worthwhile point of debate is a bigot.
4. Endless "We must get on the right side of history" and "Hey, what we're proposing is totally unobjectionable, obviously correct, just a manifestation of 'ordinary grace, and who could not want that?'"-style posturing that presupposes the legitimacy and value of the very issues being debated.  And, of course, anyone who does not toe that line or disagrees with it is a bigot.

FWIW, I think you and yours should consider setting aside the "Bigot!" schtick.  It's not a show of strength or moral superiority and virtue.  Instead, it comes across as desperate and contrived and ad hoc, particularly when its rolled out during substantive discussions such as what we have been attempting here.  It comes across as "Well, we aren't winning on substance and reasoning, so let's pull the 'Bigot!' card and see if we can distract from or shut down the conversation, and/or silence the people disagreeing with us."

On this point I am reminded of Out of the Half-Light, which was episode 11 of season 1 of Law & Order.  From IMDB:

Quote

This episode is based on the Tawana Brawley rape allegation case. In 1987, at age 15, in the small town of Wappingers Falls, New York. Tawana Brawley, a teenage African-American girl from upstate New York, was found beaten, her clothes tattered, and racial epithets written all over her body. She stated that she had been raped, though no DNA evidence was ever found. Her case received national media attention in the U.S., primarily due to Brawley's accusing six prominent white men from her town (including police officers) of gang rape. After hearing evidence, a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she herself may have created the appearance of the attack. It was eventually revealed that the whole thing had been a hoax. However, Brawley's family has maintained that the allegations were true.

See also here:

Quote

It has been said that life imitates art. But art has its own  mirror.   In 1990 Law and  Order  aired  a  parody  of  the  Tawana  Brawley  case  of  1987,  in  which  an  African American teenager claimed she was gang raped by three white police officers. The Law and  Order  episode  created  the  character  of  Congressman  Ronald  Eaton  –  a  parody composite  character  of  Rev.  Al  Sharpton,  and  attorneys  Alton  H.  Maddox  and  C. Vernon  Mason  –  who  used  the  Brawley  like  character to  stir  up  racial  animosity  full well knowing that the girl had not been raped, but faked the assault, to hide the fact that she  was  pregnant,  by  her  teenage  boyfriend,  out  of fear  of  her  abusive  father.  The episode  ends  with  a  confrontation  between  Assistant  District  Attorney  Paul  Robinette and  Congressman  Eaton.  Both  are  sitting  in  a  diner and  Robinette  tells  Eaton  that  the Brawley  character  and  her  family  have  admitted  that  there  was  no  rape  and  that  the deception  was over; the  perjury  of  the  family  will not  be  prosecuted,  the record of  the deceit will be sealed, the case will be closed, and there will be peace:

Quote

Ronald  Eaton:  Another  zombified  soul  casts  his  vote  for  order  rather than justice. Negative peace over positive peace.
Paul Robinette: Paraphrasing Martin Luther King’s thoughts won’t lend credence to yours. King walked with the angels...you’d slide in slime on your belly to get what you want. 

Eaton  protests  that  his  actions  were  not  about  his own  political  agenda  but  about bringing the fact of racist police officers and the injustices of the criminal justice system regarding  African  Americans  to  national  public  prominence.  The  confrontation  ends with this exchange: 

Quote

Ronald  Eaton:  You  look  me  in  the  eye  and  you  tell  me  this  system  is just. This system is equal.  
Paul Robinette: At times the system stinks, Eaton. I know that as well as you   do.   But   don’t   for   one   damn   minute   tell   me   that your   self-aggrandizing  polarization  is  going  to  solve  the  problem.    Don’t  tell  me that tearing down a 200-year old justice system, no matter how flawed, is going  to  alter  the  consciousness  of  a  society.  Now,  we’re  past  the separate drinking-fountain stage. We’re past legal discrimination. We’re at the hearts and minds stage. And believe me, there’s no quick fix.

 

Here's the clip on YouTube:

 

This is more or less how I view trans advocates who throw what they must know will be molotov cocktails into society ("Hey, let's give men the legal right to enter into women's bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons, etc."), act as if the proposal is innocuous, refuse to articulate any limiting principles, ignore the foreseeable adverse effects and profound societal ramifications and impositions, and distract from or shut down any contrary voices by labeling them as "bigots."

Not only is this stuff corrosive to the fabric of society and public discourse, it is counterproductive.  You and yours should, by now, be at "the hearts and minds stage" now.  I have some further thoughts on why we don't see much of that (pronouncements about one's own position as exhibiting "ordinary grace" come across as rather hollow when, in the end, that same position is defended by endless "Bigot!" ad hominems), but that can be a discussion for another day.

As a non-activist, and as an "on the outside looking in"-type observer of the trans advocacy movement, and having observed this stuff or some years now, here is what I think: The movement is built on a sense of profoundly unearned moral certainty, on the absolute conviction that its advocates are completely right, despite having done none of the intellectual or ethical heavy lifting required to actually understand the issue. 

I say this because the idea of putting men into women's spaces is radical and subversive, but they treat it as normative and innocuous.  As if those objecting to or even expressing concerns about it are obviously and axiomatically out of bounds.

I say this because these advocates will not or cannot answer entirely legitimate questions about proposals such as this. 

I say this because there are no limiting principles, and because advocates will not acknowledge that there are no limiting principles.  Motte-and-bailey all over the place.

I say this because the movement's go-to response before, during and after any discussion with someone who disagrees with them is "Bigot!"

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

And a central piece of your evidence is that I’m a smart guy.

Not just that. 

A smart guy who nevertheless refuses to articulate any limiting principles, who insists that “It isn’t happening, so we don’t need a rule,” but then refuses to articulate what the "rule" is or should be (that is, who is and is not excluded from women's spaces under your proposal). 

A smart guy who refuses to acknowledge that his proposal results in de facto and/or de jure eradication of sex-segregated spaces.

A smart guy who nevertheless declares obvious cross-application of his "proposal" to women's locker rooms, sports and prisons does not exist, and that these are entirely "separate issues."

A smart guy who acts as if his radical proposal is innocuous, and who refuses to address - or even acknowledge the existence of - foreseeable and profound and adverse effects on the rights of women and girls, for whom sex-segregated spaces were created, and also on workplaces, public spaces, schools, physical facilities, religious organizations and properties, and so on.

A smart guy who regularly utilizes ad hominem slurs to distract from or delegitimize or silence viewpoints which differ from his (e.g., "I can’t help but wonder whether the real problem is them and involves something that rhymes with spigotry").

A smart guy who refuses to acknowledge that there is considerably more at stake, relative to the interests of women and girls, than just "safety" (either that or explain why there is nothing else at stake).

It's your smarts and your actions/inactions in this thread that have created the basis for my assessment.

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

Apparently, I’m too smart to honestly disagree with your predictions, so I must secretly know you’re right. As if your confidence in your conclusions is evidence of my dishonesty.

No, your comments in this thread are evidence of what I see as a calculated motte-and-bailey strategy.

I may be wrong.  I had assumed your proposal was a studied and carefully formulated thing, rather than an off-the-cuff, throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks idea.  The questions I have been presenting for weeks now are not obscure nitpicks.  They are what any lawyer or judge or legislator or what-have-you would ask about the potential consequences of enacting your proposal.  I have been asking you to address these real-world ramifications, and you aren't obliging.  It's dodge after dodge, peppered with "Bigot!"  I had chalked that up to calculated strategy, but perhaps you simply have not given the matter as much thought as it deserves.  Again, we all know you're a smart guy, so I don't know how else to account for the various and extensive and substantial deficiencies in your defense of your own proposal. 

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

I’ve explained why restrooms need not have the same rules as prisons, shelters, or sports. You treat those distinctions as camouflage. If I explain myself, I’m defending the motte. If I deny your accusation, I’m retreating to it. What could I possibly say that you wouldn’t interpret as further concealment?

Simple: Answer my questions.  Stop evading and ignoring.  Stop changing the subject and answering questions I haven't asked.  Stop calling me a bigot for raising these questions.  

I'd like to see more than "those are 'separate issues.'"  That needs to be demonstrated, not just asserted.

I'd also like to see you either A) articulate particularized limiting principles which apply to your proposal, or B) admit that there are no such limiting principles.  As it is, you are doing neither.

I'd also like to see you acknowledge the foreseeable consequences of your proposal, including either A) a clear acknowledgment that your proposal necessarily results in the eradication of sex-segregated spaces, or B) a reasoned explanation as to how such spaces can be maintained when you refuse to articulate any meaningful limiting principles as to who can and cannot enter those spaces.  I would also like to see you address at least some of the legal repercussions of your proposal (see, e.g., here), or else explain how you think these repercussions will not happen, or that if they do happen they do not matter (to women and girls, to society in general, etc.).

I'd also like to see you acknowledge that there is considerably more at stake, relative to women and girls (again, the exact group of persons for whom sex-segregated spaces were created), than just "safety," or else explain why there are no other considerations in view.

I'd also like you set aside the accusations of bigotry.  It's just a thought-terminating cliché that diminishes your argument in ways you do not seem to appreciate.

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

You said you were working to improve your conversations by following Steven Collis’s Habits of a Peacemaker. You specifically highlighted resisting the temptation to caricature another person’s position. How does assigning me a malicious agenda, then dismissing my stated beliefs as a cover story, put that into practice? That is an extraordinarily cynical way to treat someone who has spent weeks explaining himself to you.

Yes, I've probably been falling short of my aspirations in this thread.  I'll work on that.

Again, I had assumed your "proposal" was a studied and thoroughly-evaluated-in-advance sort of thing, rather than an off-the-cuff thing.  If it was, then I would think you would be both willing and able to defend it, address its real-world ramifications (such as the eradication of sex-segregated spaces), articulate its parameters, identify limiting principles or explain where there should not be any, and so on.  If it was not, then my assessment of your arguments has been off, and I should apologize.

For such an apology to be sincere, I'll need clarification on this.  Have you given your proposal any real scrutiny prior to presenting it here?  Why have you refused, for weeks now, to either articulate limiting principles or explain why no such principles are needed?  Why have you refused to acknowledge that your proposal will result in the eradication of sex-segregated spaces?  These are all reasonable and obvious inquiries, and yet you have treated them as arising from "bigotry."

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

Your catastrophe analysis fails to engage with the Massachusetts evidence we’ve discussed.

Again:

Quote

I hadn’t seen that specific February 2025 Williams Institute brief circulated in this thread yet. It appears it is essentially an update and reframing of their earlier 2018 Massachusetts study (and related work).

The core claim is familiar: they find no statistically significant increase in reported safety or privacy crimes in restrooms/locker rooms after gender-identity inclusive public-accommodations policies, and they emphasize that transgender people report higher rates of harassment or denial when required to use facilities matching their sex.

The article is real and has been public since early 2025. It does not resolve the underlying disagreement about whether sex remains a legitimate basis for single-sex spaces. It measures a narrow set of outcomes under a particular set of assumptions.

(Emphasis added.)

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

It doesn’t settle everything, but a long list of things that hypothetically could go wrong doesn't change the evidence about what actually happened when we allowed many-looking people to use the women’s restroom rather than forcing them into the women’s as you want the law to do.

The Massachusetts study is not an answer to the legal analysis. It counted police-logged incidents in restrooms and locker rooms in a few Boston-area towns around local gender-identity ordinances. It found those recorded incidents were rare and did not clearly rise with the ordinances. That is one narrow result under one set of assumptions. It does not measure women who stop using the room, girls who change in a stall or skip PE, employees told that objecting is a policy violation, or the same identity-as-sex rule applied to sport, shelters, and prisons. An empty or flat police file is not “what actually happened.” It is what that paper chose to count.

The design is also markedly thinner than the citation implies. The treated sample is small, record systems differed by department, and matching is limited. A 2026 methodological critique in Theory and Society, The Not-So-Curious Case of the Bathroom Safety Study: Ideological Bias and the Erosion of Scholarly Scrutiny, argues the study cannot support the press-release claim that such laws “do not jeopardize safety,” only that police-logged incidents did not clearly jump in three Boston-area jurisdictions relative to their pairs. That cannot retire a statewide or national rule, and it cannot speak to institutions the authors never observed.

You also have the access rule backwards. A sex-based rule does not “force manly-looking people into the women’s room.” It puts females in the women’s room and males in the men’s, including a female who looks masculine and a male who looks feminine. Self-ID is what makes sex and appearance legally irrelevant and treats a woman’s objection as the problem. If a bearded female is wrongly challenged, that is a courtesy and training failure. It is not a reason to make male admission the default.

And yet again, a safety-from-reported-felony concept is not the only interest these spaces exist to serve. They exist so women and girls can undress and relieve themselves without a men in the room (I know, I know, "trans men are men" and all that is your borne-of-"empirical-reality" position, but it's not mine), and so they can say so without becoming the subject of an HR or civil-rights complaint. Those are not hypotheticals stacked against “the evidence.” They are why the category “women’s room” exists. A rule that turns admission on self-description abolishes that category whether or not next year’s larceny count moves.  You are not addressing this.

If your position is self-ID for bathrooms and sex for sport, shelters, and prisons, that is a carve-out you have to write into the law. The proposal under discussion does not. It uses one rule: identity governs access. A paper about restroom crime in a few towns does not make that rule harmless, and it does not make the other consequences disappear.

14 hours ago, Analytics said:

I’ve been sincerely trying to explain my point of view. You’ve chosen to treat those explanations as concealment of something sinister. There’s no productive conversation left under those terms.

Well, you could answer my questions instead of evading/ignoring them.  

Question No. 1: How, other than by assertion, are women's locker rooms, sports, and prisons “separate issues” that a self-ID bathroom rule will not reach? What legal distinction keeps identity-as-sex from traveling to and from these various points?

Question No. 2: What is the limiting principle of your proposal—who may be refused entry to a women’s facility, on what showing, by whom—or do you concede there is none?

Question No. 3: Does self-ID without a limiting principle extinguish sex-separated spaces in a de facto or de jure way, or both? If not, how is a “women’s” room still sex-separated when admission is the entrant’s subjective self-declaration and nothing else?

Question No. 4: Which of the legal and institutional effects already identified (employer discipline of women who object, collapse of a usable sex line, the same rule in custody and sport) do you say will not occur, and why? If they occur, why do they not count?

Question No. 5: Why is reported restroom crime the only interest that matters? Sex-separated spaces were built for privacy and dignity for women and girls, as well as safety. Which of these interests do you discard, and on what grounds?

Question No. 6: The Massachusetts paper measured police-logged incidents in a few Boston-area towns. Why does that result answer questions 1–5?

Question No. 7: State whether you are willing to set aside accusations of "bigotry."  My inquiries are about the your proposal.  You have already made it clear what you think of me as a person, so there's no need to keep beating that dead horse.  Just answer the questions posed to you about your own proposal.

I have been blunt and, to an extent, accusatory in this thread, in ways that do not conform with the Habits of a Peacemaker approach I have been attempting to implement.  I will work on that.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited yesterday at 04:43 AM by smac97

[Analytics]

For the record:

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 1: How, other than by assertion, are women's locker rooms, sports, and prisons “separate issues” that a self-ID bathroom rule will not reach? What legal distinction keeps identity-as-sex from traveling to and from these various points?

A: Toileting is a biological function we all must perform regularly. Locker rooms are used for planned activities that are not biologically necessary and often involve changing clothes or communal nudity. Sports are organized competitions with their own safety and fairness considerations. Prisons involve involuntary confinement by the state and require individualized security assessments.

Those factual differences justify different legal rules. Different statutes apply, different governmental interests are involved, and courts decide the particular dispute before them. I am proposing that gender identity matter when deciding which public restroom someone should use. I am not asserting that gender identity replaces biological sex for every legal purpose. No legal principle requires a restroom rule to travel automatically to sports, prisons, or locker rooms.

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 2: What is the limiting principle of your proposal—who may be refused entry to a women’s facility, on what showing, by whom—or do you concede there is none?

A: My proposal concerns ordinary public restrooms, not every facility designated for women.

People should ordinarily use the restroom most appropriate to their identity, presentation, and circumstances, with the individual making that decision. Someone may be removed for voyeurism, harassment, lewd conduct, threats, or other behavior that would justify removing anyone else. Facility staff, security, or law enforcement may intervene based on credible evidence of such conduct. Mere suspicion about someone’s biological sex would not be enough.

Yes, that line leaves room for judgment. That is intentional because people and circumstances vary. Calm and other women have explained that they do not want masculine-presenting transgender men required to use the women’s restroom. I am listening to them.

Our disagreement is that you want the state to impose a universal biological-sex rule, while I think ordinary discretion and conduct-based laws usually produce better results.

 

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 3: Does self-ID without a limiting principle extinguish sex-separated spaces in a de facto or de jure way, or both? If not, how is a “women’s” room still sex-separated when admission is the entrant’s subjective self-declaration and nothing else?

A: Sincere self-identification is a limiting principle. It excludes biological males who do not sincerely identify as women, including men who invoke gender identity merely as a pretext.

I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females. But that does not mean women’s restrooms cease to exist. They remain designated for women, and ordinary men remain excluded. You are treating any exception to biological-sex exclusivity as the eradication of the category itself. That conclusion does not follow.

In practice, nearly everyone would make the same restroom choice under either rule. Most transgender people also try to avoid confrontation and use the facility where they attract the least attention.

Your argument treats the possible harm from allowing transgender women to use public toilets as decisive while disregarding the harm caused by legally requiring masculine-presenting transgender men to enter women’s restrooms where they generally are neither expected nor wanted. Both consequences belong in the comparison.

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 4: Which of the legal and institutional effects already identified (employer discipline of women who object, collapse of a usable sex line, the same rule in custody and sport) do you say will not occur, and why? If they occur, why do they not count?

A: The premise of the question is disputed. You have identified possible effects, but you have not established that all of them follow from my restroom proposal.

Employers should not discipline women merely for expressing a good-faith privacy concern or requesting an accommodation. They may discipline employees for harassment or for refusing to follow lawful workplace policies. Whether a particular disciplinary action is justified depends on what the employee did, not simply on the existence of a gender-identity access rule.

My proposal does change the access line for public restrooms: biological sex would not be the sole criterion. It does not make biological sex unusable or abolish it as a category. Sex can remain relevant in medicine, sports, prisons, and other settings where different interests are involved.

I do not support automatically applying the same rule to sports or prisons. Sports raise questions of competitive fairness and physical safety. Prisons require individualized decisions about safety, vulnerability, security, and confinement. Federal prison regulations already use case-by-case assessments rather than gender identity alone.

Any actual adverse consequences count. So do the harms caused by your rule, including compelled mismatches, public scrutiny, mistaken challenges, and bathroom avoidance. The question is not whether consequences count. The question is which policy produces less total harm.

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 5: Why is reported restroom crime the only interest that matters? Sex-separated spaces were built for privacy and dignity for women and girls, as well as safety. Which of these interests do you discard, and on what grounds?

A: Reported crime is not the only interest that matters, and I have never said it was. It matters because safety is repeatedly offered as a justification for a new coercive law. If the law is supposed to prevent a safety problem, asking for evidence that the problem exists is entirely appropriate.

I also care about privacy, dignity, and comfort, including those of biological women and girls. That is why I oppose a law that requires masculine-presenting transgender men to use women’s restrooms and encourages people to scrutinize women who do not look sufficiently feminine. Privacy includes being left alone while using a toilet.

I discard none of these interests. I disagree with your assumption that they can be protected only by categorically excluding every biological male. My proposal asks which rule protects privacy, dignity, and safety better in actual public restrooms, after counting the harms caused by both policies.

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 6: The Massachusetts paper measured police-logged incidents in a few Boston-area towns. Why does that result answer questions 1–5?

A: It doesn’t answer Questions 1–5 by itself, and I have never claimed that it does. It addresses one important empirical issue: whether gender-identity access laws are associated with increased reported assaults, sex crimes, or voyeurism in restrooms and similar facilities.

The study found that such incidents were rare and did not significantly increase after the laws were adopted. That does not prove that no incident ever occurred, measure every form of discomfort, decide sports or prison policy, or supply a complete legal rule.

It does, however, bear directly on your repeated predictions that gender-identity access creates serious safety and privacy harms. Those predictions are factual claims, and the available evidence does not support them. The study is one part of the analysis, not an answer to every question.

19 hours ago, smac97 said:

Question No. 7: State whether you are willing to set aside accusations of "bigotry."  My inquiries are about the your proposal.  You have already made it clear what you think of me as a person, so there's no need to keep beating that dead horse.  Just answer the questions posed to you about your own proposal.

A: I am willing to set aside accusations about you personally and address the substance of your arguments. I will not promise never to describe an argument, policy, or pattern of conduct as bigoted if I believe that description is relevant and can explain why. But I agree that the label should not substitute for evidence or reasoning, and I will not use it that way.

 

[Analytics]

As I type this, OpenAI is rolling out their latest/greatest model, Astra 6. It is hyped as being especially good at complex, multi-step problem solving. As a demo and FWIF:

Prompt

I want to design a policy governing access to publicly accessible, multi-user restrooms that minimizes harm to biological women and girls and protects their safety, privacy, dignity, and practical ability to use those facilities.

Treat “women and girls” in that objective as biological females, so the analysis does not obtain its answer by silently expanding the defined population. Evaluate effects on transgender people, intersex people, caregivers, parents, businesses, employees, law enforcement, and other restroom users separately, because harms to those stakeholders still matter when evaluating the policy’s overall consequences.

Compare at least these alternatives:

1. Access determined by sex assigned or recorded at birth.
2. Access determined by sincere gender identity.
3. Access determined primarily by gender presentation and ordinary social judgment.
4. A conduct-based or hybrid rule.
5. Continued informal discretion under existing laws against harassment, voyeurism, exposure, assault, and disorderly conduct.

Consider foreseeable benefits and harms under each policy, including crime, harassment, unwanted exposure, subjective discomfort, mistaken challenges, compelled placement of masculine-presenting transgender men in women’s restrooms, bad-faith claims, enforcement errors, bathroom avoidance, vigilantism, administrative costs, lawsuits, and effects on social norms.

Do not assume that the presence of a transgender woman is inherently harmful. Do not assume that objections to her presence are inherently irrational or big prejud. Distinguish discomfort from violations of privacy, and both from physical danger. Account for the frequency and severity of each outcome rather than relying on isolated anecdotes or theoretically possible abuses.

Limit the primary analysis to ordinary public restrooms. Do not assume that the same rule must govern locker rooms, communal showers, competitive sports, shelters, or prisons. Discuss separately whether the restroom policy would create legal precedents affecting those settings.

Use the best available empirical evidence, identify its limitations, and distinguish demonstrated effects from predictions and value judgments. Explain how bad-faith cases would be handled and who would have enforcement authority. State what evidence would cause you to choose a different policy.

Define what you mean by “optimal,” then recommend the policy most likely to produce the best overall results, giving particular attention to its effects on biological women and girls. Steelman the strongest objection to your recommendation before answering it.
 

Astra

I recommend a hybrid policy for ordinary public restrooms: retain women’s and men’s facilities, permit access consistent with sincere gender identity, strengthen bodily privacy, and give staff clear authority to address threatening or intrusive conduct. Provide private facilities wherever reasonably feasible.

This is a provisional judgment about expected consequences. Existing evidence does not establish that this policy uniquely minimizes harm to biological females. It also does not establish that birth-sex restrictions improve their safety enough to offset those restrictions’ foreseeable harms.

“Optimal” means the feasible policy with the lowest expected harm, giving particular priority to biological females’ safety, privacy, dignity, and practical access while explicitly considering everyone else. Frequency, severity, duration, enforcement errors, and costs all matter. Assault, repeated intimidation, intrusive questioning, and momentary discomfort should not receive equal weight.

Biological females remain the defined population. That includes transgender men and female nonbinary people, whose outcomes should also be reported separately. Transgender women’s outcomes belong in the other-stakeholder assessment. Overlapping categories should not produce double-counting.

If exclusively female occupancy is an overriding requirement, birth-sex eligibility follows more directly. But that stipulates sex exclusivity as the objective rather than demonstrating that it best minimizes harm.

The most directly relevant published study compared Massachusetts localities with and without gender-identity-inclusive public-accommodation laws. Using police reports involving assault, sex crimes, and voyeurism in restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms, it found no statistically significant increase associated with those laws. Hasenbush, Flores, and Herman

That finding is informative but limited. Police records miss unreported incidents and most discomfort or avoidance. Rare events limit statistical power. The study combined facility types, did not comprehensively measure female-specific outcomes, and examined legal changes that might not substantially change actual usage. Its observational design also limits causal inference. “No detected increase” does not mean zero additional risk.

A 2025 Williams Institute review reports another analysis finding no increase in stranger violence following inclusive laws. However, the cited manuscript was unpublished, and its outcome was broader victimization, not specifically violence against females in restrooms. The review also documents transgender respondents’ reports of harassment, denied access, and bathroom avoidance. Those surveys establish relevant experiences but cannot isolate a law’s causal effects. Review

A frequently cited school study associated restroom/locker-room restrictions with sexual assault among some transgender youth groups. It was cross-sectional, and assaults were not necessarily in restrooms. It does not prove that restrictions caused restroom assaults. Murchison and colleagues

The central evidence gap is reliable comparison of biological females’ total experience under competing policies: victimization, exposure, mistaken challenges, discomfort, avoidance, and practical access.

The five alternatives have different strengths and weaknesses.

First, birth-sex eligibility preserves a female-only entitlement, reassures users who value sex separation, and permits intervention against an ineligible entrant before misconduct. However, it directs transgender men into women’s facilities unless alternatives exist. Enforcement based on appearance can target masculine females. Documentary verification creates practical burdens, while bodily verification would itself threaten privacy. Light enforcement relies heavily on appearance and honesty; intensive enforcement increases costs and mistakes.

Second, sincere-gender-identity eligibility avoids directing transgender men into women’s rooms and accommodates transgender women’s ordinary use. Its weaknesses are unverifiable sincerity, dishonest claims, and some females’ discomfort or loss of confidence in sex exclusivity. It is an access principle, not a complete safety policy.

Third, presentation and ordinary social judgment often permit unobtrusive use without formal verification. But as an official rule, this makes eligibility depend on stereotypes, “passing,” and the observer. It burdens masculine females and visibly transgender people while remaining vulnerable to convincing disguises.

Fourth, a conduct-based hybrid targets threatening behavior and privacy intrusions while reducing identity investigations. Its weaknesses are concealed harmful intentions, inconsistent staff judgment, implementation costs, and unmet preferences for female-only occupancy.

Fifth, continued informal discretion under existing laws offers flexibility and low transition costs. Where it works well, sweeping legislation may be unnecessary. However, unclear standards can produce arbitrary exclusion, neglected complaints, and uncertainty about preventive intervention.

These comparisons are mostly operational predictions, not measured effect sizes. Each alternative should receive the same feasible privacy improvements and resources; otherwise, architecture gets confused with eligibility.

Physical danger, bodily privacy, and discomfort must remain distinct. Assault and confinement concern danger. Peering, recording, and unwanted exposure concern bodily privacy. Unease can exist without either, but persistent distress causing bathroom avoidance is a consequential access problem.

An interest in sex-exclusive space also deserves recognition. It may reflect modesty, religion, trauma, or a preference for female association. It is neither proof of danger nor inherently irrational. My value judgment is that it warrants meaningful accommodation without automatically overriding another person’s ordinary restroom access. Private facilities address much of this concern, though they do not reproduce female-only shared space.

The recommended policy would operate as follows.

Retain women’s and men’s designations and permit sincere identity-based access without medical treatment, prescribed clothing, or documentary proof. Clearly communicate eligibility, including a usable option for nonbinary people.

Require working locks, effective stall screening, discreet menstrual-product disposal, and prompt repairs. Improve enclosure during renovations and provide accessible private facilities where feasible. Preserve capacity so improvements do not worsen women’s queues.

Prohibit filming other users, peering into stalls, deliberate intrusive exposure, sexual harassment, threats, blocked exits, and unauthorized entry into occupied stalls. Accommodate legitimate assistance, disability-related needs, and ordinary bodily functions.

Staff should act on specific observations or credible reports before injury occurs. Repeated attempts to look through a stall gap or following a particular child can justify intervention without waiting for assault. Appearance or transgender status alone should not.

Permit necessary accompaniment by parents and caregivers, plus emergency and maintenance access. A private family facility is preferable when available, but its absence must not make essential assistance impossible.

Anyone may report concerns and receive respectful assistance. A sincere complaint is not harassment. Patrons should not interrogate strangers, demand documents, photograph them, or obstruct them.

Managers handle ordinary complaints and substantiated violations; security assists when necessary; police handle suspected crimes or immediate danger. Disputed exclusions should receive review. Authority must operate within applicable law.

Identity supplies neither proof of safety nor immunity. A person credibly shown to be making a dishonest claim solely to bypass eligibility can be redirected. Massachusetts guidance illustrates that inclusive access can include an improper-purpose limitation. Guidance

Nevertheless, a quiet liar displaying no concerning conduct may gain access. That is a real vulnerability. Presentation rules likewise admit convincing disguises, while birth-sex rules reduce this vulnerability only insofar as verification occurs.

Stakeholder effects require separate accounting. Females gain better bodily privacy and fewer appearance-based challenges, but some lose confidence or avoid facilities. Girls and trauma survivors may particularly need private options. Transgender people gain usable access. Intersex people avoid public adjudication of anatomy or records. Caregivers gain clear assistance rules. Businesses bear training and renovation costs. Employees gain clearer standards, while police focus on conduct. Effects on other users, including displacement into men’s facilities, also matter.

Social norms may change in either direction. Inclusive rules may normalize unobtrusive transgender use or weaken confidence in sex boundaries. Restrictive rules may reinforce boundaries or encourage surveillance of unfamiliar-looking women. These remain predictions.

This recommendation does not determine policy for showers, locker rooms, sports, shelters, or prisons. Those involve different exposure, fairness, residential vulnerability, or confinement concerns.

Legal spillover is possible but not automatic. A facility policy generally creates no judicial precedent; statutes and rulings can have broader implications. Bostock expressly reserved bathroom and locker-room questions. Narrow statutory scope and context-specific reasoning reduce spillover without preventing future litigation. Opinion

The strongest objection is that female-only access supplies a preventive safeguard. Inclusive eligibility weakens that boundary, admits dishonest claims, and asks females to identify threatening conduct after entry. Small studies cannot establish that this trade is safe.

That objection is substantial. The answer is that a boundary must be evaluated through actual enforcement. Birth-sex rules admit masculine-presenting transgender men, need assistance exceptions, and can expose females to intrusive scrutiny. The decisive question is how much additional protection they deliver relative to their consequences. Current evidence does not establish that balance in their favor.

I would change the recommendation if credible comparative evidence showed that restrictions materially reduced serious harm to females after accounting for enforcement mistakes, avoidance, displacement, and costs. Substantial female avoidance despite privacy improvements, recurring exploitation of identity claims, or demonstrably effective and minimally intrusive verification would also warrant reconsideration.

Evaluation should combine confidential surveys and incident records, separating discomfort, privacy violations, threats, assaults, denied access, queues, and costs. Serious incidents warrant immediate investigation and targeted correction; general policy changes should follow evidence about preventable mechanisms and comparative risk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[smac97]

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 1: How, other than by assertion, are women's locker rooms, sports, and prisons “separate issues” that a self-ID bathroom rule will not reach? What legal distinction keeps identity-as-sex from traveling to and from these various points?

A: Toileting is a biological function we all must perform regularly. Locker rooms are used for planned activities that are not biologically necessary and often involve changing clothes or communal nudity. Sports are organized competitions with their own safety and fairness considerations. Prisons involve involuntary confinement by the state and require individualized security assessments.

Those factual differences justify different legal rules. Different statutes apply, different governmental interests are involved, and courts decide the particular dispute before them. I am proposing that gender identity matter when deciding which public restroom someone should use. I am not asserting that gender identity replaces biological sex for every legal purpose. No legal principle requires a restroom rule to travel automatically to sports, prisons, or locker rooms.

Thank you for your response.

Those are differences in setting. They are not a legal wall.  It is the practical legalities that I am asking you to address.

The rule you are defending is not “people need to pee.” It is that gender identity determines which sex-marked facility the person may use. Public-accommodations statutes, school facility rules, and Title IX guidance have never confined that substitution to a toilet stall.  You don't even have to take my word for it on this point, as there is ample evidence from your side of the argument that substantiate it.  The 2016 Dear Colleague letter - the purpose and results of which I assume you endorsed - treated restrooms and locker rooms as the same Title IX sentence. GLAAD and the ACLU, both of which - like you - are advancing "advocacy" positions, state the claim as facilities and activities. Stonewall treated everyday toilets and changing rooms as the default inclusion zone. That is not assertion. It is how the same advocates and the same agencies wrote the rule.  

These issues are bundled together.  Policy decisions made for one will affect the others.  Your denial of that is both wishful thinking and not responsive to my question.  “Different statutes” only helps you if the statutes use different words. They do not. When “sex” is read to mean "identity" in a restrooms case, the next complaint under the same statute—locker room, team, housing unit—arrives with that reading already in the file. Courts decide the case in front of them. They also cite the last case. That is how the category travels. You do not get a restroom-only holding unless someone writes a restroom-only statute.

Necessity cuts both ways. Women also have to use toilets. The question is not whether elimination is optional. It is whether men may be present in women's restrooms while they (women) do it, and whether saying so becomes the civil-rights problem.

Locker rooms add nudity; they do not become a different legal universe. They are the same sex line applied where clothes come off.

Sports and prison add fairness and security, respectively, as further considerations. They still depend on whether the institution may maintain a female category at all. If identity is enough at the bathroom door, the burden shifts onto the women who want the door to mean something in the next room.

You say you are “not asserting that gender identity replaces biological sex for every legal purpose.” That is a personal reservation and preference. It is not in the proposal. The proposal has no limiting principle for who may be turned away, on what showing, by whom. Until you write one that a school, a gym, and a warden can administer without being sued for the same “misgendering” theory, locker rooms, sport, and prisons are not separate issues. They are the next complaint under the rule you have already adopted.

You are not addressing the legal realities that come with your proposal.  I have previously surmised that this was an intentional motte-and-bailey tactic.  Again, you are a smart guy.  I had assumed you had given your proposal some real thought and consideration, either before posting it or since.  And I had assumed you would have run your proposal through an AI platform a time or two.  And yet your response to "How, other than by assertion, are women's locker rooms, sports, and prisons 'separate issues' that a self-ID bathroom rule will not reach?" is . . . to repaint your "separate issues" assertion: "different legal rules," "{d}ifferent statutes apply," "different governmental interests are involved."

As much as I disagree with the positions taken by GLAAD and the ACLU and the other advocacy groups, I do appreciate their ability and willingness to address what you will not, namely, that public policy and legal analysis about men in women's bathrooms are inextricably linked to policy/analysis about men in women's locker rooms, sports and prisons.  GLAAD gets it.  So does the ACLU.  They get it and, to their credit, acknowledge it and treat these issues for what they legally are: an intertwined, package deal in which policy set in one is going to be analogized and applied to another.  

So what is going on here?  As you are staking out a position markedly different from GLAAD and the ACLUE, are you saying they are wrong to treat these matters in this way, and that you are right?  If so, what is your legal reasoning?  We need to get past sheer assertions ("factual differences justify different legal rules," "{d}ifferent statutes apply," "different governmental interests are involved").  They are not argument or reasoning.  They're just an expression of how you think things ought to be.

What "factual differences" do you think exist that "justify different legal rules" between women's bathrooms and other sex-segregated spaces?

What governmental interests do you think apply to women's bathrooms (such as justifies putting men in those spaces or excluding them) but not to women's locker rooms?

What governmental interests do you think apply to women's bathrooms but not to women's sports?

What governmental interests do you think apply to women's bathrooms but not to women's prisons?

Why is your "these are separate issues" claim more legally tenable than the "package deal" position advanced by GLAAD and the ACLU?

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 2: What is the limiting principle of your proposal—who may be refused entry to a women’s facility, on what showing, by whom—or do you concede there is none?

A: My proposal concerns ordinary public restrooms, not every facility designated for women.

People should ordinarily use the restroom most appropriate to their identity, presentation, and circumstances, with the individual making that decision. Someone may be removed for voyeurism, harassment, lewd conduct, threats, or other behavior that would justify removing anyone else. Facility staff, security, or law enforcement may intervene based on credible evidence of such conduct. Mere suspicion about someone’s biological sex would not be enough.

Yes, that line leaves room for judgment. That is intentional because people and circumstances vary. Calm and other women have explained that they do not want masculine-presenting transgender men required to use the women’s restroom. I am listening to them.

Our disagreement is that you want the state to impose a universal biological-sex rule, while I think ordinary discretion and conduct-based laws usually produce better results.

Our current disagreement is that I have asked you to either A) articulate coherent limiting principles for your proposal, or B) concede that your proposal has no such limiting principles.  You've been dodging and evading this inquiry for weeks, and you have done so again here.  

What you are describing is a rule about misconduct after entry. It is not a limiting principle on who may enter in the first place, nor is it an acknowledgment that your proposal does not have any limiting principles.

“Identity, presentation, and circumstances,” with the individual deciding, means there is no eligibility line. A male who says he belongs there belongs there. That's it.  No limiting principle in view.  Staff may not act on “mere suspicion” of sex. So the only people who can be refused are people already committing a separate offense—voyeurism, threats, lewdness—that would get a woman thrown out too, and even then they are thrown out after having legally entered already. That is ordinary criminal and trespass law. It does not preserve a women’s room.  It is not a limiting principle as to who can enter into women's bathrooms in the first place, which is what I have been asking you to articulate for weeks now. It merely preserves a de facto unisex room with a women’s sign and a conduct code.  I understand this.  GLAAD and the ACLU understand this.  Now I am to conclude that you, being the very smart person that you are, do not understand this, so much so that you are incapable of answering the question I have posed over and over (to identify limiting principles or to acknowledge there are none)?

“Ordinary public restrooms, not every facility” is a personal limit you have not written into any statute, handbook, or training. The moment the same person walks from the toilet to the locker room, or a school applies the same nondiscrimination clause, you are back in Questions 1 and 2. 

Judgment without a standard is the problem, not the solution.  After-the-fact “credible evidence of misconduct” is easy to say and hard to use when the policy also says A) anyone who wants to can go into women's bathrooms (because, again, there are no limiting principles), and B) women and girls are not allowed to scrutinize sex or appearance. A woman who reports a male in the room has offered suspicion of sex. On your rule that is not enough. Staff who ask are the ones who get the complaint. That is how the space is policed in the only direction the policy allows: against the woman who noticed.

The bearded female is a misdirect. A sex rule sends females to the women’s room, including a masculine-presenting female. It does not “force transgender men into the women’s room” as a punishment; it treats them as female. If you want masculine-presenting females in the men’s room, you have switched legal horses midstream: from identity to looks, while also saying that "looks" should not be investigated.  You cannot refuse a sex line and an appearance line and still claim there is a line.

"Discretion plus conduct" laws are what we already had for people who use the correct room and then behave badly. The dispute is whether a male may be in the room before any crime occurs. Your answer is yes, unless and until he enters into a women's bathroom (as anyone can, since there are no limiting principles) and then does something independently illegal. This is an admission that there is no limiting principle on entry. It is only a principle on expulsion after the fact.

I must think that you recognize this.  It's pretty darn obvious.  I can't reconcile that surmise of your intelligence with your refusal to acknowledge this obvious thing, except to conclude it is a motte-and-bailey tactic, which you have denied.  So what are you doing?

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 3: Does self-ID without a limiting principle extinguish sex-separated spaces in a de facto or de jure way, or both? If not, how is a “women’s” room still sex-separated when admission is the entrant’s subjective self-declaration and nothing else?

A: Sincere self-identification is a limiting principle. It excludes biological males who do not sincerely identify as women, including men who invoke gender identity merely as a pretext.

I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females. But that does not mean women’s restrooms cease to exist. They remain designated for women, and ordinary men remain excluded. You are treating any exception to biological-sex exclusivity as the eradication of the category itself. That conclusion does not follow.

In practice, nearly everyone would make the same restroom choice under either rule. Most transgender people also try to avoid confrontation and use the facility where they attract the least attention.

Your argument treats the possible harm from allowing transgender women to use public toilets as decisive while disregarding the harm caused by legally requiring masculine-presenting transgender men to enter women’s restrooms where they generally are neither expected nor wanted. Both consequences belong in the comparison.

"Sincerity" is not a limiting principle. It is an unverifiable mental state.

Staff may not act on “mere suspicion” of sex. They have no test for sincerity, no document you will let them demand, and no permission to notice a male body. A pretext from a pervert and a sincere claim from anyone else look the same at the door. A principle that cannot be applied is not a principle. It is a hope that people will be honest.  It is wishful thinking.  Not workable and legally enforceable public policy.  

I do appreciate that you have now conceded the legal point, but you then contradict yourself:

Quote

I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females. But that does not mean women’s restrooms cease to exist. They remain designated for women, and ordinary men remain excluded.

I am really struggling to understand what your position is.  If anyone who wants to can go in, and if there is no limiting principle keeping anyone out, then how in the world do "ordinary men remain excluded?"

You have been evading this for weeks now.

Who gets to say who is excluded (as in "excluded" from ever going into the women's bathroom in the first place, not after someone has done something wrong after having already entered the space)? 

By what rule or statute? 

How are "ordinary men" (I take that to mean "non-trans-identifying" men or some such) to be legally excluded from the bathroom while other men ("trans women") are legally allowed to enter?

Why are you evading these entirely legitimate questions?  If it's not because you have a motte-and-bailey purpose under your hat, then what is keeping you from answering?

A women’s room that is “not exclusively limited to biological females” is not a sex-separated space. It is a mixed-sex space with a women’s sign, into which anyone can enter. “Designated for women” does no work once “woman” includes any male who says so. Ordinary men are excluded only if they decline to say the sentence. That is not exclusion by sex. It is exclusion by refusal to self-ID. De jure the category is no longer sex. De facto it lasts only as long as males choose not to use it.

“Nearly everyone would make the same choice” is not a rule. It is a prediction, and it is already false in locker rooms, prisons, and sport—the places you keep characterizing as "separate issues." People who want the access use the access. People who do not want confrontation are not the ones who test the policy.

The bearded female does not rescue the proposal. Under a sex rule she is female and belongs in the women’s room. If other women are uncomfortable, that is a courtesy problem inside a female category. It is not comparable to admitting males as a class (particularly given that your proposal allows anyone to enter) . One is an edge case about presentation. The other is a change in who the room is for. Treating those as equal “harms” in the comparison is how the category is talked out of existence while the sign stays up, all the while subordinating or disregarding the interests of women and girls who want sex-segregated spaces to remain as such.

If the room is still “for women,” say who a staff member may turn away when the only fact is a male body and a female identification. If the answer is no one, until a separate crime occurs, the space is not sex-separated. It is unisex with extra steps.

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 4: Which of the legal and institutional effects already identified (employer discipline of women who object, collapse of a usable sex line, the same rule in custody and sport) do you say will not occur, and why? If they occur, why do they not count?

A: The premise of the question is disputed. You have identified possible effects, but you have not established that all of them follow from my restroom proposal.

Employers should not discipline women merely for expressing a good-faith privacy concern or requesting an accommodation. They may discipline employees for harassment or for refusing to follow lawful workplace policies. Whether a particular disciplinary action is justified depends on what the employee did, not simply on the existence of a gender-identity access rule.

My proposal does change the access line for public restrooms: biological sex would not be the sole criterion. It does not make biological sex unusable or abolish it as a category. Sex can remain relevant in medicine, sports, prisons, and other settings where different interests are involved.

I do not support automatically applying the same rule to sports or prisons. Sports raise questions of competitive fairness and physical safety. Prisons require individualized decisions about safety, vulnerability, security, and confinement. Federal prison regulations already use case-by-case assessments rather than gender identity alone.

Any actual adverse consequences count. So do the harms caused by your rule, including compelled mismatches, public scrutiny, mistaken challenges, and bathroom avoidance. The question is not whether consequences count. The question is which policy produces less total harm.

You have described the mechanism and then denied that it fires.

If the workplace policy is identity-based access, a woman who, differentiating by sex, asks a male to leave the women’s room is not “expressing a concern.” She is refusing/defying the policy. That is the charge HR will write. “Harassment” is the label the policy already uses for noticing sex.

You say employers should not punish good-faith privacy objections. You have also said suspicion of sex is not enough to intervene. Those two sentences cannot be administered together. The employee who speaks is the one who created a record. That is why the corporation silences her, and any other woman who does the same thing, first. It is not a separate hypothetical. It is how a protected-class policy works when "identity" is treated as "sex."

“I do not support automatically applying the same rule to sport or prison” is your preference, and your wishful thinking. It is not a legal distinction. The same statute, the same agencies, and the same advocates already use one sentence: facilities and activities consistent with identity. Federal prison placement is “case by case” on paper. The cases that get litigated are demands to be housed by identity. A restroom-only reservation that lives only in this discussion we are having on this message board will not be the brief filed next year.

Sex remains “relevant” in medicine only if someone is still allowed to say what it is. Once the institution has trained staff that sex is not a permissible basis for a facility decision, the usable sex line is the one nobody will enforce. That is collapse de facto. De jure it is a mixed-sex room with a women’s sign. You already conceded exclusivity is gone.

All consequences count. They do not weigh the same. Compelled presence of a masculine-presenting female in a female room is an awkward edge of a female category. Compelled presence of males as a class, plus discipline of women who object, is a qualitative change in the category.

“Less total harm” is not a finding that one Massachusetts police-log paper can supply. It is a request that women and girls absorb the new risk (anyone can go into what are supposed to be sex-segregated spaces) and the new speech rule (women and girls are prohibited from saying anything about men in women's spaces) so that identity can govern the door. If those institutional effects occur and you still want the policy, I think you should actually say they are worth it. Do not say they will not occur because you would rather they were filed under a different heading.

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 5: Why is reported restroom crime the only interest that matters? Sex-separated spaces were built for privacy and dignity for women and girls, as well as safety. Which of these interests do you discard, and on what grounds?

A: Reported crime is not the only interest that matters, and I have never said it was. It matters because safety is repeatedly offered as a justification for a new coercive law. If the law is supposed to prevent a safety problem, asking for evidence that the problem exists is entirely appropriate.

I also care about privacy, dignity, and comfort, including those of biological women and girls. That is why I oppose a law that requires masculine-presenting transgender men to use women’s restrooms and encourages people to scrutinize women who do not look sufficiently feminine. Privacy includes being left alone while using a toilet.

I discard none of these interests. I disagree with your assumption that they can be protected only by categorically excluding every biological male. My proposal asks which rule protects privacy, dignity, and safety better in actual public restrooms, after counting the harms caused by both policies.

If you discard none of those interests, you still have to say how a woman vindicates them when a male is already in the room and “suspicion of sex” is not grounds to act.

Privacy here is not only “being left alone.” It is being free of the opposite sex while undressed or using a toilet. That is why the room was marked "Women" in the first place: to exclude men from the space. A rule that forbids noticing sex, and that treats a request to leave as the problematic incident, does not leave her alone. It leaves her with a choice: absorb the intrusion and remain silent about it, or else become the problem and face the consequences. Dignity is the same interest. It is not comfort as a preference. It is the institutional statement that this space is not for men.

Safety evidence is a fair demand if the only claim is “self-ID will produce a crime wave.” Again, that is not the only claim. The Massachusetts paper counted police-logged incidents in a few towns. It did not count women who stopped using the facility, girls who wait or skip, or employees who were told not to say anything. Those are privacy and dignity costs. They do not appear in a felony file.

The masculine-presenting female is still the wrong comparison. A sex rule does not police femininity. It police’s sex. A female who looks male is not “required to use the women’s room” as a humiliation. She is female. If you want her in the men’s room to spare other women a glance, you have switched to an appearance test—the scrutiny you say you oppose. Self-ID plus “don’t look” does not protect the woman who does not pass. It protects the male who claims the label.

Also, I am disappointed you persist in ignoring the elephant in the room.  I think we all know the vast majority of issues that will arise from your proposal will not be about women who "identify" as men going into women's bathrooms, but rather about all males having lawful access to women's bathrooms.  The "masculine-presenting female" may generate some sympathy, but it also evades the central concern affecting women and girls.

You say the question is which rule protects privacy, dignity, and safety better after counting both sides. Counting requires a rule that can still say no at the door. Yours says no only after a separate offense. Until then the women’s interest is subordinated to the entrant’s declaration. That is not weighing the interests. It is ranking them and prioritizing the interests of men at the expense of the interests of women and girls who want sex-segregated spaces. I think you need to acknowledge ranking if that is the proposal. Do not describe it as protecting the same things the sex line was built to protect.  It doesn't.

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 6: The Massachusetts paper measured police-logged incidents in a few Boston-area towns. Why does that result answer questions 1–5?

A: It doesn’t answer Questions 1–5 by itself, and I have never claimed that it does. It addresses one important empirical issue: whether gender-identity access laws are associated with increased reported assaults, sex crimes, or voyeurism in restrooms and similar facilities.

The study found that such incidents were rare and did not significantly increase after the laws were adopted. That does not prove that no incident ever occurred, measure every form of discomfort, decide sports or prison policy, or supply a complete legal rule.

It does, however, bear directly on your repeated predictions that gender-identity access creates serious safety and privacy harms. Those predictions are factual claims, and the available evidence does not support them. The study is one part of the analysis, not an answer to every question.

Then I don't think you can keep citing it as if it is.

You used Massachusetts to wave off a legal analysis as a “list of hypotheticals” against “what actually happened.” The paper measured police-logged assaults, sex crimes, and voyeurism in a few Boston-area towns. That is one empirical slice of one interest. It does not tell you whether identity-as-sex travels to locker rooms, sport, or custody. It does not tell you who staff may refuse at the door. It does not tell you whether a women’s room remains sex-separated when admission is a declaration. It does not tell you what HR does with the woman who objects. Those were Questions 1–5.

You now agree the study does not answer them. Good. Then it cannot be the rebuttal to them.

The study also does not do what you still claim for “privacy harms.” An incident that never becomes a police report is not a finding that nothing happened, but that is nevertheless how you are treating it. Avoidance, undressing in a stall, a girl who waits for an empty room, a worker who is told not to speak—those are privacy costs. They are outside the dataset. Again, the 2026 Theory and Society critique of that paper argues it cannot even support the stronger press-release claim about safety, only that logged incidents did not clearly jump in a handful of treated jurisdictions. That is a thin plank for a statewide or nationwide rule.

Predictions of a crime wave and analysis of a legal rule are not the same thing. The rule changes who may be present and who may be punished for noticing. That follows from the text of the policy whether next year’s voyeurism count moves or not. If your remaining point is only “we have not seen a statistically significant spike in those particular charges in those particular towns,” say that. Do not treat it as evidence that the institutional effects are imaginary, or that Questions 1–5 have been met.

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

Question No. 7: State whether you are willing to set aside accusations of "bigotry."  My inquiries are about the your proposal.  You have already made it clear what you think of me as a person, so there's no need to keep beating that dead horse.  Just answer the questions posed to you about your own proposal.

A: I am willing to set aside accusations about you personally and address the substance of your arguments. I will not promise never to describe an argument, policy, or pattern of conduct as bigoted if I believe that description is relevant and can explain why. But I agree that the label should not substitute for evidence or reasoning, and I will not use it that way.

Sounds good.

If I argue that your proposal results in a de facto and/or de jure eradication of sex-segregated spaces (which you now kinda sorta admit: "I agree that under my proposal, a women’s restroom would not be exclusively limited to biological females"), that is not bigotry (which is what you said previously: "If ... somebody remains convinced that sex-distinct bathrooms are suddenly in mortal jeopardy without bathroom laws, I can’t help but wonder whether the real problem is them and involves something that rhymes with spigotry").  It's a recognition of how the law and logic and reality work.

If I say "'trans women' are not women," that is not bigotry.  It is a statement of reality (on par with other truisms such as "black is not white," "dogs are not cats" and "apples are not oranges"), and a statement predicated on a refusal to go along with an ideological and radical redefinition of "woman."

If I say that gender dysphoria is a mental illness, that is not bigotry.  It's a statement of the contents of DSM-V.

If I dispute that man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one, that is not bigotry.  It's a statement of biological and empirical reality.

If I say that a sex-based rule is superior to wholly subjective ones ("self-identity," "appearance," etc.), that is not bigotry.  That is a reasoned conclusion based on an axiomatic thing, namely, that sex-segregated spaces should be segregated by sex.

If I dispute the claim that a man who sincerely believes he is a woman trapped in a man's body, that is not bigotry (As SU put it: "Your denial of their lived experience is your bigotry.").  It's a rejection of an utterly subjective and empirically untestable assertion.

And so on.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 13 hours ago by smac97

[Calm]

5 hours ago, Analytics said:

while birth-sex rules reduce this vulnerability only insofar as verification occurs.

This is what I have been wondering about.  How would birth sex rules improve safety without ID checking becoming an issue?

[Calm]

5 hours ago, Analytics said:

Females gain better bodily privacy and fewer appearance-based challenges, but some lose confidence or avoid facilities.

This seems like it would happen if birth sex rules are put in place as well, if not more (see my previous posts).

[smac97]

10 hours ago, Analytics said:

As I type this, OpenAI is rolling out their latest/greatest model, Astra 6. It is hyped as being especially good at complex, multi-step problem solving. As a demo and FWIF:

Prompt

I want to design a policy governing access to publicly accessible, multi-user restrooms that minimizes harm to biological women and girls and protects their safety, privacy, dignity, and practical ability to use those facilities.

Treat “women and girls” in that objective as biological females, so the analysis does not obtain its answer by silently expanding the defined population. Evaluate effects on transgender people, intersex people, caregivers, parents, businesses, employees, law enforcement, and other restroom users separately, because harms to those stakeholders still matter when evaluating the policy’s overall consequences.

Compare at least these alternatives:

1. Access determined by sex assigned or recorded at birth.
2. Access determined by sincere gender identity.
3. Access determined primarily by gender presentation and ordinary social judgment.
4. A conduct-based or hybrid rule.
5. Continued informal discretion under existing laws against harassment, voyeurism, exposure, assault, and disorderly conduct.

Consider foreseeable benefits and harms under each policy, including crime, harassment, unwanted exposure, subjective discomfort, mistaken challenges, compelled placement of masculine-presenting transgender men in women’s restrooms, bad-faith claims, enforcement errors, bathroom avoidance, vigilantism, administrative costs, lawsuits, and effects on social norms.

Do not assume that the presence of a transgender woman is inherently harmful. Do not assume that objections to her presence are inherently irrational or big prejud. Distinguish discomfort from violations of privacy, and both from physical danger. Account for the frequency and severity of each outcome rather than relying on isolated anecdotes or theoretically possible abuses.

Limit the primary analysis to ordinary public restrooms. Do not assume that the same rule must govern locker rooms, communal showers, competitive sports, shelters, or prisons. Discuss separately whether the restroom policy would create legal precedents affecting those settings.

Use the best available empirical evidence, identify its limitations, and distinguish demonstrated effects from predictions and value judgments. Explain how bad-faith cases would be handled and who would have enforcement authority. State what evidence would cause you to choose a different policy.

Define what you mean by “optimal,” then recommend the policy most likely to produce the best overall results, giving particular attention to its effects on biological women and girls. Steelman the strongest objection to your recommendation before answering it.
 

Astra

I recommend a hybrid policy for ordinary public restrooms: retain women’s and men’s facilities, permit access consistent with sincere gender identity, strengthen bodily privacy, and give staff clear authority to address threatening or intrusive conduct. Provide private facilities wherever reasonably feasible.

This is a provisional judgment about expected consequences. Existing evidence does not establish that this policy uniquely minimizes harm to biological females. It also does not establish that birth-sex restrictions improve their safety enough to offset those restrictions’ foreseeable harms.

“Optimal” means the feasible policy with the lowest expected harm, giving particular priority to biological females’ safety, privacy, dignity, and practical access while explicitly considering everyone else. Frequency, severity, duration, enforcement errors, and costs all matter. Assault, repeated intimidation, intrusive questioning, and momentary discomfort should not receive equal weight.

Biological females remain the defined population. That includes transgender men and female nonbinary people, whose outcomes should also be reported separately. Transgender women’s outcomes belong in the other-stakeholder assessment. Overlapping categories should not produce double-counting.

If exclusively female occupancy is an overriding requirement, birth-sex eligibility follows more directly. But that stipulates sex exclusivity as the objective rather than demonstrating that it best minimizes harm.

The most directly relevant published study compared Massachusetts localities with and without gender-identity-inclusive public-accommodation laws. Using police reports involving assault, sex crimes, and voyeurism in restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms, it found no statistically significant increase associated with those laws. Hasenbush, Flores, and Herman

That finding is informative but limited. Police records miss unreported incidents and most discomfort or avoidance. Rare events limit statistical power. The study combined facility types, did not comprehensively measure female-specific outcomes, and examined legal changes that might not substantially change actual usage. Its observational design also limits causal inference. “No detected increase” does not mean zero additional risk.

A 2025 Williams Institute review reports another analysis finding no increase in stranger violence following inclusive laws. However, the cited manuscript was unpublished, and its outcome was broader victimization, not specifically violence against females in restrooms. The review also documents transgender respondents’ reports of harassment, denied access, and bathroom avoidance. Those surveys establish relevant experiences but cannot isolate a law’s causal effects. Review

A frequently cited school study associated restroom/locker-room restrictions with sexual assault among some transgender youth groups. It was cross-sectional, and assaults were not necessarily in restrooms. It does not prove that restrictions caused restroom assaults. Murchison and colleagues

The central evidence gap is reliable comparison of biological females’ total experience under competing policies: victimization, exposure, mistaken challenges, discomfort, avoidance, and practical access.

The five alternatives have different strengths and weaknesses.

First, birth-sex eligibility preserves a female-only entitlement, reassures users who value sex separation, and permits intervention against an ineligible entrant before misconduct. However, it directs transgender men into women’s facilities unless alternatives exist. Enforcement based on appearance can target masculine females. Documentary verification creates practical burdens, while bodily verification would itself threaten privacy. Light enforcement relies heavily on appearance and honesty; intensive enforcement increases costs and mistakes.

Second, sincere-gender-identity eligibility avoids directing transgender men into women’s rooms and accommodates transgender women’s ordinary use. Its weaknesses are unverifiable sincerity, dishonest claims, and some females’ discomfort or loss of confidence in sex exclusivity. It is an access principle, not a complete safety policy.

Third, presentation and ordinary social judgment often permit unobtrusive use without formal verification. But as an official rule, this makes eligibility depend on stereotypes, “passing,” and the observer. It burdens masculine females and visibly transgender people while remaining vulnerable to convincing disguises.

Fourth, a conduct-based hybrid targets threatening behavior and privacy intrusions while reducing identity investigations. Its weaknesses are concealed harmful intentions, inconsistent staff judgment, implementation costs, and unmet preferences for female-only occupancy.

Fifth, continued informal discretion under existing laws offers flexibility and low transition costs. Where it works well, sweeping legislation may be unnecessary. However, unclear standards can produce arbitrary exclusion, neglected complaints, and uncertainty about preventive intervention.

These comparisons are mostly operational predictions, not measured effect sizes. Each alternative should receive the same feasible privacy improvements and resources; otherwise, architecture gets confused with eligibility.

Physical danger, bodily privacy, and discomfort must remain distinct. Assault and confinement concern danger. Peering, recording, and unwanted exposure concern bodily privacy. Unease can exist without either, but persistent distress causing bathroom avoidance is a consequential access problem.

An interest in sex-exclusive space also deserves recognition. It may reflect modesty, religion, trauma, or a preference for female association. It is neither proof of danger nor inherently irrational. My value judgment is that it warrants meaningful accommodation without automatically overriding another person’s ordinary restroom access. Private facilities address much of this concern, though they do not reproduce female-only shared space.

The recommended policy would operate as follows.

Retain women’s and men’s designations and permit sincere identity-based access without medical treatment, prescribed clothing, or documentary proof. Clearly communicate eligibility, including a usable option for nonbinary people.

Require working locks, effective stall screening, discreet menstrual-product disposal, and prompt repairs. Improve enclosure during renovations and provide accessible private facilities where feasible. Preserve capacity so improvements do not worsen women’s queues.

Prohibit filming other users, peering into stalls, deliberate intrusive exposure, sexual harassment, threats, blocked exits, and unauthorized entry into occupied stalls. Accommodate legitimate assistance, disability-related needs, and ordinary bodily functions.

Staff should act on specific observations or credible reports before injury occurs. Repeated attempts to look through a stall gap or following a particular child can justify intervention without waiting for assault. Appearance or transgender status alone should not.

Permit necessary accompaniment by parents and caregivers, plus emergency and maintenance access. A private family facility is preferable when available, but its absence must not make essential assistance impossible.

Anyone may report concerns and receive respectful assistance. A sincere complaint is not harassment. Patrons should not interrogate strangers, demand documents, photograph them, or obstruct them.

Managers handle ordinary complaints and substantiated violations; security assists when necessary; police handle suspected crimes or immediate danger. Disputed exclusions should receive review. Authority must operate within applicable law.

Identity supplies neither proof of safety nor immunity. A person credibly shown to be making a dishonest claim solely to bypass eligibility can be redirected. Massachusetts guidance illustrates that inclusive access can include an improper-purpose limitation. Guidance

Nevertheless, a quiet liar displaying no concerning conduct may gain access. That is a real vulnerability. Presentation rules likewise admit convincing disguises, while birth-sex rules reduce this vulnerability only insofar as verification occurs.

Stakeholder effects require separate accounting. Females gain better bodily privacy and fewer appearance-based challenges, but some lose confidence or avoid facilities. Girls and trauma survivors may particularly need private options. Transgender people gain usable access. Intersex people avoid public adjudication of anatomy or records. Caregivers gain clear assistance rules. Businesses bear training and renovation costs. Employees gain clearer standards, while police focus on conduct. Effects on other users, including displacement into men’s facilities, also matter.

Social norms may change in either direction. Inclusive rules may normalize unobtrusive transgender use or weaken confidence in sex boundaries. Restrictive rules may reinforce boundaries or encourage surveillance of unfamiliar-looking women. These remain predictions.

This recommendation does not determine policy for showers, locker rooms, sports, shelters, or prisons. Those involve different exposure, fairness, residential vulnerability, or confinement concerns.

Legal spillover is possible but not automatic. A facility policy generally creates no judicial precedent; statutes and rulings can have broader implications. Bostock expressly reserved bathroom and locker-room questions. Narrow statutory scope and context-specific reasoning reduce spillover without preventing future litigation. Opinion

The strongest objection is that female-only access supplies a preventive safeguard. Inclusive eligibility weakens that boundary, admits dishonest claims, and asks females to identify threatening conduct after entry. Small studies cannot establish that this trade is safe.

That objection is substantial. The answer is that a boundary must be evaluated through actual enforcement. Birth-sex rules admit masculine-presenting transgender men, need assistance exceptions, and can expose females to intrusive scrutiny. The decisive question is how much additional protection they deliver relative to their consequences. Current evidence does not establish that balance in their favor.

I would change the recommendation if credible comparative evidence showed that restrictions materially reduced serious harm to females after accounting for enforcement mistakes, avoidance, displacement, and costs. Substantial female avoidance despite privacy improvements, recurring exploitation of identity claims, or demonstrably effective and minimally intrusive verification would also warrant reconsideration.

Evaluation should combine confidential surveys and incident records, separating discomfort, privacy violations, threats, assaults, denied access, queues, and costs. Serious incidents warrant immediate investigation and targeted correction; general policy changes should follow evidence about preventable mechanisms and comparative risk.

This is a clearer statement of the same proposal, not a different one. "Identity" still governs entry in the first instance (and allows anyone into what was created as a sex-segregated space), and conduct governs expulsion after entry. Sincerity is, somehow, supposed to function as the eligibility test. Stalls and “private options” are the consolation prize given to women, on the condition that they surrender sex-segregated spaces and silence themselves about it. "Birth-sex" exclusion is treated as a stipulated taste rather than the very purpose for which women's spaces are created and maintained. The model is honest enough to say the evidence does not show this uniquely minimizes harm to biological females, but then recommends it anyway.

Let's start with the definition of “optimal.” It says the objective is lowest expected harm, with particular priority to biological females’ safety, privacy, dignity, and practical access. It then says existing evidence does not establish that identity access does that. The recommendation is therefore not the policy that won on the stated criterion. It is the policy that survives after sex exclusivity is redescribed as an extra preference and after “do not assume a transgender woman’s presence is inherently harmful” is loaded into the prompt’s scoring. If female-only occupancy is what privacy and dignity are in a shared toilet, that is not a silent expansion of the population. It is the content of the interest.

And self-ID, "sincere" or otherwise, is still not administrable. The model admits a quiet liar with no visible misconduct gets in. Staff may not use appearance or status alone. There is no showing, no official, and no moment of refusal except a separate offense. That is Question 2 unanswered. Calling it a “hybrid” does not add a gate. It just adds a lock on the stall and a training memo.  Women and girls still get the short end of the stick.

The Massachusetts paper is still the load-bearing study, and it still doesn't bear the load you are putting on it. To its credit, the model lists the right caveats: a tiny treated sample, police logs, mixed facility types, no female-specific total experience, weak causal desig, etc., and then lets “no detected increase in those charges” do work those caveats forbid. It does not measure avoidance, dignity, HR discipline, or the usable sex line.  Again, a 2026 methodological critique in Theory and Society is why that paper should not be treated as the empirical floor for a statewide rule. “Predictions of a crime wave are overstated” is not the same as “the institutional effects are imaginary.”

Women who "identify" as men are used again as the symmetry that makes sex rules look cruel (when we all know the elephant in the room is men in the bathroom). A sex rule places females in the women’s room. If that is “compelled placement,” every sex-separated space is compelled placement. The comparison only works if the harm of a masculine female in a female room is treated as equal to admitting males as a class. Those are not equal. One is an edge of a female category. The other is the end of the category.  You are still not acknowledging that your proposal eradicates sex-segregated spaces.

On spillover the model is careful and still too neat, by a long shot. Bostock reserved bathrooms. Lower courts, agencies, and advocates did not. The 2016 "Dear Colleague" letter put restrooms and locker rooms in one sentence. Public-accommodations clauses do not contain a “toilets only” proviso. You can write a narrow statute. This recommendation does not. It says the same rule need not govern showers, sport, or prison, then offers no legal distinction that would stop the next complaint from quoting the restroom policy as the meaning of “sex.” That was Question 1.

The steelman is the right objection: a preventive sex line is what the space is; identity access asks - requires - women to detect danger after the male is already inside.  Small studies cannot certify the trade. The model answers that birth-sex rules also have costs, and that current evidence does not “establish that balance in their favor.” That shifts the burden. The status quo to be justified is the demolition of exclusivity, not the existence of a women’s room. If the evidence gap is “we have not measured females’ total experience under competing rules,” the recommendation should be: do not change the eligibility rule until you have. As it is, the gap is used to keep identity at the door and to call stalls an adequate substitute for a female-only room.

What would change my mind is the inverse of the model’s last paragraph.

That is, show a limiting principle that a clerk can apply without a lawsuit.

Show why "identity-as-sex" in a restroom policy will not be cited in the locker-room brief (and good luck with that).

Show that women who object will not be the ones disciplined.

Show that the policy will not eradicate, de facto and/or de jure, sex-segregates spaces.

Until then, all this is still just a "self-ID" plus conduct law, with better partitions. That may be a building code, it it is not a women’s facility.

Thanks,

-Smac