I don't understand the focus on someone, in your view, lying to you - I suspect we agree that in the scenario you described, it seeming that the person has lied to you about what's in their pants is much less important than the fact that they whipped it out in front of your family. It wouldn't be any better if a man who identified as such snuck into the changing room and did the same thing. I think focusing on criminal behavior is similarly focusing on an edge case, given that the vast majority of trans people, and people in general, are not criminals who expose themselves to children.

What about this more likely scenario: If this co-worker never did such a thing, they were a perfectly pleasant and normal person to work with, and you only found out they were trans after you or they had left the company and you no longer worked together, would you still be angry they had lied to you - why or why not? Would whether they'd ever gone into a changing room in your presence affect that anger?

What if this person was someone like the photo I used in the other thread, and they looked something like this: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRO1Vem... - the next time you saw them, would you start referring to them as "she" and call them a liar?

I don't fundamentally agree that dressing, acting, or wanting to be referred to a certain way equates to lying to someone about what's in their pants. Even if it did, I also just don't fundamentally understand why it matters if someone does lie to you about that, in average everyday situations.

I can understand that there are circumstances where it does matter. I'm not saying it couldn't ever. But I don't understand why the default position is rejection and anger.

> The entire point of language is to "cut reality at the joints", we create words in order to group natural kinds together in a way that allow for common understanding and decision-making. If society wants to redefine "woman" as meaning something else, we would still want a word to mean "adult human female" because it is a natural kind. When we redefine woman, we see all the contortions people go . All of science, all of human knowledge relies on being better and better at organizing and recognizing and create common language around finding patterns in nature.

That seems like a solvable problem to me. Our initial attempts at solving it have been awkward, but we'll get there. I think I'm more concerned about what path society agrees on going forward than the specifics of how we do it, for now.

> Destroying these distinctions and saying, "it's all what a person wants to be" is completely novel in history

This also is not true. There are numerous well-documented cases of trans people throughout history, and there are long-standing concepts of "third genders" and others dating back thousands of years (see e. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender#Old_World).