All fair enough.

There's also the possibility of accidentally entering wrong characters-- I assume this is unlikely since people should know how to type their names, but people have to type their names so much that even a low chance of fumble-fingers is going to occur now and then.

Or their mom might be a hacker.

Incidentally, there are many cases where I don't care about my username at all and have to come up with something. I'd find it acceptable if they'd just give me a number and a password, or let me register just with a password (perhaps provided by them?), maybe plus e-mail.

I could ask the same question about the man who claims to be Jesus.

You could ask it, but I think a correct answer would look quite different in the two cases.

I should preface this by saying that I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, and will welcome corrections from those who are. So, anyway, my understanding is that if someone thinks he's Jesus then either (1) he expects to have some super-Jesus-powers like performing miracles or offering teaching so supremely wise that following it will greatly improve anyone's life[1], and/or (2) his thinking in this area is so seriously disordered that it's a bit of a stretch to say that he actually "thinks" he's Jesus as opposed to merely saying it but not really understanding what that would mean.

[1] For the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that the actual Jesus (assuming there was one) had those superpowers; only that those superpowers are part of what is meant by "Jesus" in the context of someone claiming to be him. In case 1, his beliefs are falsifiable and will generally be falsified. In case 2, they are unfalsifiable but this isn't much of a steelman; the point is just that he's not thinking coherently.

What about the other case? Well, here my understanding is that (1) the people in question do not have falsifiable-and-will-be-falsified beliefs; they do not, e.g., think that their anatomy is different from what it actually is. And (2) their thinking in this area may differ from (e.g.) yours but it is not incoherent and they don't in any way resemble people undergoing schizophrenic episodes.

So, first of all: Do you disagree with me about this? If so, (a) on what points and (b) how do you suggest we go about determining which of us is nearer the truth?

Now, so far what I've said about transgender people has been purely negative -- I've said "no, they don't think X and don't have problem Y". Perhaps you disagree not about that but about what you (rightly or not, we'll see) expect me to say about what they do think. So let's proceed.

The model of gender they're working with goes something like this:

• Gender is not simply a matter of anatomy or genetics or biochemistry.
• What it actually is is a matter of social role-filling and self-perception.
• Therefore, someone who is seen by others and themself as female is female.
• This means that, e.g., there isn't a valid inference from "female" to "able to bear children" or "interested in having sex with men" or "not very strong" -- but there never was anyway; some people are infertile, some people have non-majority sexual preferences, some people are much stronger or weaker than average, etc.
  • It makes no difference to speak of to the perfectly valid statistical inference: if someone is female, they are much more likely to be able to bear children, much less likely to be able to lift very heavy weights, and so forth.

Do you think something in that is delusional, on a par with thinking you're both Jesus and John Lennon? It doesn't look that way to me. (As it happens, I think this is a better account of gender than any that makes gender a matter of anatomy or genetics or biochemistry, but at present I'm not concerned with defending that claim; the only relevant point is that it isn't crazy.)

In terms of this model, it's clear enough (I think) what someone means when despite having a Y chromosome they say "I am a woman". They mean: "I am much more comfortable thinking of myself as female than as male; I wish to occupy a female role in society, to use a traditionally female name, etc.". This would make little sense if "female" meant "possessed of a uterus" or "having two X chromosomes", but (see above) that isn't what it means in this context.

*

Finally: Let us suppose that all of the above is, in some way I'm failing to see, totally wrongheaded, and that in fact there is a Right Way to determine someone's gender, and that Right Way is a matter of looking at their chromosomes or something, and that we therefore really are talking about "men claiming to be women". There remains what seems to me a pretty clear distinction between someone in that position and someone claiming to be Jesus-the-son-of-God. Namely: in almost all contexts treating someone as a woman despite their male-typical anatomy and chromosomes is easy and harmless, and empirically it makes these people much less likely to kill themselves. (And no one has yet found anything else that does.) Whereas treating someone as the Son of God probably means, e.g., worshipping them, which is a much less reasonable thing to ask others to do.

I repeat that my primary disagreement with you on this point is about whether transgender people are really much like people who think they are Jesus; the point of the previous paragraph is just that even if I'm completely wrong about that, it doesn't follow that we should adopt the position I think you are suggesting we should.

How large is the investment ? Do websites need to have a gender field? Not including one would be a slight saving. It might make sense to just have an optional title field.

a male prisoner who [...] likes to be around female prisoners

So there are specific contexts in which taking people's expressed gender identity at face value would work badly. Fair enough. But as the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law"; the question "are there contexts where doing X works badly?" may be less appropriate than "in most contexts, does doing X work better than not doing X?". It could be that (1) letting allegedly transgender criminals get moved to different prisons on the basis of their "new" gender is a bad idea, but that (2) outside prison, taking allegedly transgender people at face value is generally much better than not.

Still, let's consider that example a little more carefully. It's certainly true that we would prefer not to have male criminals get themselves put in all-female prisons just by saying "I'm a woman now", because they might endanger the other inmates. So, you do two things. First, you don't let people switch gender simply by saying "I'm a ---- now". Perhaps, e.g., you (1) require an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria (this will eliminate some would-be abusers, but no doubt some will be convincing enough to pass this filter), (2) don't switch anyone into a [new gender] prison unless they've got as far as a course of hormone treatment (this will eliminate most remaining would-be abusers, I think), and (3) as I think is commonplace outside prison, you don't let them have that hormone treatment until they've lived for an extended period "as" their newly adopted gender. New name, new clothes, etc. (This is part of why #2 is an effective filter, though the effects of the hormones will be a bigger part.)

Second, you use the mechanisms that surely already exist for keeping prisoners safe from one another. For instance, surely some women are very dangerous to other women, and they are kept in solitary confinement or watched extra-carefully or something. So if, e.g., an apparently-male criminal abruptly declares "I'm a woman now" and gets through the filters above, maybe they have to put up with being treated as much more dangerous to (other) women than a typical woman in the prison they get sent to.

And of course if they do then (say) assault someone else, down comes the wrath of the law and the prison system on them, and their life thereafter is going to be really unpleasant. If they're calculating and controlled enough to convince a psychiatrist that they have a gender dysphoria they don't really have, and to put up with living as a woman and getting dosed with anti-androgens and oestrogens and whatnot, they're probably also capable of figuring out that actually harming anyone is liable not to be worth the trouble.

All things considered, I don't actually see much practical opportunity for abuse here -- and this is the example you picked.

Since you appear to be new here, let me explain the local social norms. Around here people are expected to provide arguments for their positions.

Okay... People who are seeking to change social norms in general are not usually considered insane in the same way as someone who is making claims that their sensory input is showing them something different from everyone else.

For example, social norms would not allow women to walk topless outside except in exceptional situations, even where it is legal. This is often a problem... for example, even the edge case breastfeeding mothers are marginalized; more generally, bare-chested women as a class are marginalized. Changing this social norm would require changing gender norms. Generally, advocating for this change is acceptable, although not always respectable.

However, I do not think that you really care about gender norms. I think that you are specifically worried that adding further gender categories is a form of pandering to people who want to increase static without increasing signal; that is, the information that someone does not identify as traditionally female does not appear to be useful information to you, and therefore you view this as needless static.

Let me know if I am wrong.

However, if we are looking at domain knowledge as something worth exploring to allow you to interact with other people, as in the examples given for coders, you can see how awareness of this could be very important. After all, many people of non-standard genders feel more strongly about those identities than they do about religion, so you might reasonably view a basic knowledge of these views as equally important as knowing the basics of major religions.

If you are uncomfortable with this, you might simply avoid people who identify with non-standard genders. However, I would suggest that you can more profitably communicate with people of non-standard genders than with people who are hallucinating.... However, my personal sample size of interactions with people who are hallucinating/delusional in a psychological sense is fairly small, so I could be wrong.

That's because the distinction doesn't actually exist.

Surely it does. One is a classification system based on biology, the other is a cultural template determined by the local culture.

You can argue that they match most of the time, or even that they should match all the time, but in contemporary usage the words "sex" and "gender" clearly have distinct meaning.

That's because the distinction doesn't actually exist. In particular, to the extent gender refers to a real concept and not an pure XML tag, it refers to what is commonly called sex.

This is an interesting claim. Things that are often lumped into 'gender' includes things like dress, pronouns, and bathrooms, and these things are very important to people. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are.

You are very unclear as to what you are suggesting. One obvious interpretation is that caring if you wear a dress or a tie is the same as hallucinating, and we should stop doing it. This is an interesting claim... and potentially a very useful one. I would support this. I would also support unisex bathrooms and gender neutral pronouns. So we might not disagree at all.

But it is also possible to interpret your claim as saying that non-standard genders are less valid than standard ones, even when the standard ones are arbitrary or harmful. This is harder to defend -- in fact, no one defends this as a general theory except extreme moral relativists (the claim that 'woman are not worthy to vote' is generally not held to be true based on the culture you are in, but to have a higher reasoning behind arguments for and against; in case it is not obvious, voting was assigned as a gender role; a voting woman would be outside of either standard gender for much of our history). Obviously this is an extreme example, but you can see that gender matters; if in your life you find that the only reason that gender matters is whether or not your bathroom has an urinal or not, this is very good for you.

(It is also possible that you believe that we currently have developed the perfect gender roles, and any change would be a worsening of conditions. This is sufficiently different from my own view that I am not willing to spend my time debating it unless you give me some sort of compelling evidence up front.)

I think that this is sufficient for you to see why I claim that you are equivocating on gender and sex. I'm fairly certain that what you actually want to claim is something much less strong, simply that using made-up pronouns and complaining about what bathroom you are assigned is annoying at best, and perhaps a sign of a personality disorder. In this case, you might want a very different list than the one provided.

Others have already mentioned the benefits of commercial sites pandering to their clients, so I needn't elaborate.

True - but in the context of the top post, you can and should be looking at cases where gender roles are non-traditional. After all, this is a post about edge cases and overgeneralized beliefs. Gender roles are an excellent example of arbitrary rules being over applied. This applies both to cases when we are dealing with other members of our own culture, and with members of other cultures.

The problem is that it's a two-way street. What you see is not what I see, and if person X is claiming A, I myself might be seeing D instead. Reality-wise, we would probably have to check their genes, but that's less practical. So instead people go to their intuition and just call them whatever they think fits.

It's also a pretty big offense to call a woman a man, and vice-versa, so there's still risk in that.

The whole point of the list is that there are exceptions to rules that most people consider to be true in all cases.

If you program systems than you get bugs because of corner cases that you don't anticipate. You need domain knowledge to know all the corner cases.

Leap seconds manage to crash real world computer systems because their designers didn't handle them properly.

You don't want any software that has a calendar to crash simply because a user asks the system to show september 1752.

If you ask someone directions, they're probably not going to add "unless the road isn't temporarily blocked"

In many cases Google Maps has disclaimers like that.

In programming you usually do care more about edge cases then you care in daily life.