> No, under transgender ideology -- "transwomen are women" -- the MtF trans-woman being naked, penis-and-all in a locker room is not a crime. In fact, states that have fully adopted this ideology have made it illegal to expel that trans-woman from the locker room. It is this ideology that I reject. See for instance: https://reduxx.info/korean-womens-spa-forced-to-erase-biolog... https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...

The way you wrote your example, I didn't read it as "the person happened to be naked near my wife and child," I read it as "the person purposefully exposed themselves to my wife and child intending them to see it." It's not normal changing room etiquette to present your genitalia to people forcefully or purposefully and it could be a crime of assault even if the person had the same genitalia as the offender. Did I misunderstand you?

Assuming you actually meant "a person was incidentally naked around my wife and child and a penis was visible for a moment," I am having a much harder time finding that objectionable in the same way as I found what I understood the scenario to be. I'm not saying I'm for it, maybe there needs to be some third solution so people aren't uncomfortable, but I'm not seeing it as harmful in the same way an open sexual assault would be. Is the concern that trans people will commit assault, or is it that they will be present at all?

> So it would be the same with the trans person I meet later on. I would simply not use the person's pronouns, I would be polite and neither affirm nor deny their status. I would be wary and limit my interactions because I would, charitably speaking, lack of a theory of that person's mind, and it would simply not be worth by time, energy, and risk for me to try to navigate the situation without getting myself in trouble.

I don't agree that this example with Mike is an apples-to-apples comparison. You have a mapping in your head of "wears dresses and skirts and makeup and long hair, must have a vagina," and I just don't consider that mapping to be valid. Here's a counter-example that I think is more accurate to the situation:

Your colleague Mike wears a ring on his ring finger. He has many photos on his desk of himself with a woman about his age, in which they are hugging or in funny poses together. He refers to her as "Alice" and he mentions her frequently. You assume that Mike is married, and Alice is his wife. For years you and Mike talk about Alice together and he never quite says anything to dispel this, nor do you ask.

Years after you work together, you find out that Alice is Mike's sister, and the ring is a family heirloom. Mike is not and has never been married and is confused and maybe grossed out at someone's suggestion that he's married to Alice.

Did Mike lie to you, or did you just make an assumption about him that wasn't accurate?

There seems to be this fundamental expectation that people will organize and present themselves in a way that allows you to map them into the categories you have in your head. When people don't fall neatly into those categories, it seems like you treat them as incomprehensible at best, purposeful liars at worse, when the reality is that all assumptions are just assumptions and there's no reason not to just be like "oh, I made a wrong assumption" and then move on.

> There is a big difference between a third gender and a man saying, "I'm a woman because I say so" or "transwomen are women." Eunuchs, eg, were not women, and were not considered to be so. If we want to say that cross-dressing men are a "third gender" that is more acceptable to me than saying they are women and entitled to all the rights and privileges of women and you are fired or cancelled if you say otherwise.

I think you should look into concepts like "nonbinary" and "genderfluid"; all of these things exist along a spectrum of "trans" identity and they're not as distinct from each other as you consider them to be. The "third gender" example is only one that I supplied for convenience. There are plenty of others. The point is that gender is not an immutable concept.

Honestly, if I had to sum up one overall point over these comments, it feels like I'm saying "gender is not immutable and doesn't need to be" and you're saying "yes it is and when people try to make it otherwise it's disturbing." I'm having a lot of trouble understanding that perspective.