A village where little girls turn into boys aged twelve (2015)

This reminds me of colour preference, where girls are more likely to say they like pink than boys and so people conclude pink is for girls and blue is for boys, yet if you ask what their favourite colour is, the top pick for both sexes is blue.

So the evidence on trucks doesn't support the claim you replied to, but maybe they'd be on firmer ground if they said boys had proportionately less interest in stuffed toy animals than trucks.

Personally, I have many causes I support. This doesn't have to be one of yours, but all I'm saying is, just because you want to spend your time on more important things doesn't mean you should spend your time telling people how unimportant transgender issues are.

> This has caused some people to decry

If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.

So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.

> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?

Because everyone does.

But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes. That fact will never really change. But it doesn't have to be some big problem wrt bathroom use if we just have more private restrooms in public spaces.

I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street earlier this month. Private bathrooms allowed me to do things like brush my teeth without being thrown out. There is very much a classist double standard in what is socially acceptable use of a public bathroom.

Traveler brushing their teeth in a public bathroom? Totes fine. Homeless person doing the same thing? Excellent excuse to ban them from the premises.

Muslim washing their shoes and feet before praying in the hallway on a college campus? Totes fine. Homeless person washing their shoes or feet in the same bathroom? Misuse of the facilities and we need to ask you to leave.

There are lots of ways in which public bathrooms are burdensome for anyone who does not readily fit in with whatever the social norms happen to be. Some of the groups for whom it is burdensome lack the means to make their problem part of the public debate. Other than me occasionally commenting on it in public forums, I am not aware of anyone advocating for the rights of homeless people where it comes to public bathroom use.

There are old TV shows where, for example, cross dressers have to decide which bathroom to use. If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs and I don't see why we need a public debate about their bits and bathrooms. There is an available robust solution that could make it a non issue.

Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender?

Most people are not actually comfortable pooping or dealing with their period, etc, in a public toilet with other people around. There are some people who cannot make themselves poop in public.

In private homes where we share bathroom facilities with our closest people, such as blood relatives or a spouse, the convention is that bathrooms are private and the door gets closed. Most folks don't want to use the toilet with witnesses, even when those witnesses are their most intimate friends and family.

So, I really fail to see why anyone would give push back on this idea. Most people do not actually like using public bathrooms to begin with and public facilities create undue friction for the most marginalized people, like homeless people and trans people. If private bathrooms were the default, we wouldn't even be having a public, nationwide debate about which bathroom trans people should be using. That wouldn't solve all their problems by any stretch of the imagination, but it would remove one burden from their life that is excessive and that unnecessarily sets them apart from other people.

If you think it is not excessive, try spending the day just not using the toilet at all. Most people use the toilet multiple times per day and cannot hold it for eight or ten hours straight. Unless they work from home and basically live as shut ins who get all groceries delivered, etc, this will be a nightmarishly large problem on an ongoing basis.

That isn't normal & healthy development, any more than blindness is normal & healthy. Rather, AIS is a medical condition, a syndrome that causes suffering.

I agree there probably aren't that many transgender people, but the best estimates I've seen suggest that there are probably a little over a million in the US. It is a tiny fraction of the US population — less than half a percent — but on the other hand, cities with that many people are considered a pretty big deal. It seems like an issue worth considering — not the cornerstone of a political movement, sure, but I don't think it is the cornerstone of one, unless you're considering "trans rights" as a political movement of its own (in which case, that's kind of tautological).

Yeah, that's true, but for more conventional identities the possible misalignments are not as extreme and basic.

Regarding the example, I was picking on one given, particularly on the seasonable part. I realize people were adorning themselves before the industrial revolution. But then again, people of all genders were doing that.

Well of course. I'm not saying babies reinvent gender roles every generation. I'm saying the opposite. Society is the one who defines gender roles and teaches the kids what's expected of them. Like in the article.

>>> What I'm saying is that the assumption that gendered color preferences are pushed on children is, IMO, faulty

I never said pushed. But the fact that pink is seen as a feminin colour or that boys don't wear skirts because reasons is entirely made up. There's nothing innate about it.

>>> You're assuming that gender roles are pushed onto children.

I never said pushed. I'm saying it's not innate.

>>> The kids indoctrinate themselves

Again, that doesn't mean it's innate.

That's kind of a tangent. It's easy to com up with other examples - e.g Engineer vs engineering trained person, scientist vs scientifically qualified person etc..

However, to focus on this point; Given the word fan is considered neutral, and people uncontroversial refer to themselves as others as fans, to me refutes the idea that you can derive the meaning of language from narratives around their origins..

> Who says that?

me, with as much authority as your original assertions

> But I only hear "the gays" from

but isn't that cause vs correlation?

> you're making the point you're trying to refute.

I don't follow your logic. I didn't supply the example your feel refutes my point. Plus, your example is biased by whatever circles you happen to run in - who gets to judge who is/isn't informed? Can I guess the people you are talking about (as uninformed) are also an outgroup relative to you?

The long-term implications of sexual reassignment surgery are far from settled.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/

You could look at chromosomal sex, but even that can get weird. You have Kleinfelter's people (XXY), people who are XX but male because they have the SRY gene on one of their X chromosomes (XX Male/ de la Chappelle syndrome). You have people who have a Y chromosome but develop female because of androgen insensitivity.

You can even have people that are chimeras that literally have both XX and XY genes in their body; there is a report of somebody who was 94% XY giving birth.

There's a whole spectrum of intersex possibilities and ambiguous genitalia. Historically, doctors would pick which sex was surgically easiest to assign to the baby if their genitalia were ambiguous, and that was kind of disastrous because it's not just a societal construct and not just something you can flip at birth.

Biologically speaking the presence or absence of SRY is kinda the closest thing to technical that you can get; that is the gene that causes the ovotestis to develop into testicles and start secreting testosterone and anti-mullerian hormone. Pretty much all the other changes in sexual development are keyed by levels of sex steroids.

But as mentioned even if you have that, all kinds of things can cause that go weird; from your body not making testosterone, to it not being responded to correctly, to the womb environment introducing other chemicals that alter brain development.

And especially with brain development, we don't really know how it works. There's studies that look at - if you take a baby mouse, and remove its ovaries/testes, and give it hormone X, then it acts this way towards other mice that looks more male or female.

However, humans aren't mice and a lot of our sexual behaviors are pretty unique to the species (like face to face sex), and even then, our brains are way more complicated and complex. The difference between gender and orientation is almost impossible to see in an animal model (usually they look at things like, does the mouse try to mount female mice when they are receptive, does it exhibit lordosis posture, etc).

> However this would be a massive overhaul to our entire society.

Depends on the age involved but it really doesn't change anything the first few years. We'd have to get over the obsession with blue for boys and pink for girls and painting the rooms and gender reveal parties... but not much else. I mean historically (young) boys and girls wore basically the same clothes (just so more didn't need to be made/bought) and were treated the same because it really doesn't make any difference.

Bathrooms are kinda the first thing but really what other difference is there? Especially before puberty?

And let's not forget that even then, you're always going to have people who are ambiguous or fall between the cracks. Gender nonconforming, genderfluid, genderqueer - people who just don't feel one label fits them all the time. Even within the two-gender framework you have effeminate gay men, tomboys, and all sorts of other perfectly valid identities.

Fair enough, I would not advocate for nifty fifties or rural Iraq style forcible/near-forcible gender roles. The extent to which force is involved is the extent to which they are wrong.

If you take force out of the equation, you get a useful mental model; put force in, and you get a repressive system.

> The fact that people are living longer and child mortality rates are down inherently creates social pressure to handle things differently than in the past.

This is definitely true, but it seems this question is already answered for us: people continue to want to have kids at nearly the same rate (after the initial decline), but typically trend toward or below the replacement rate in terms of the typical number of children per household.