you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.
Well, I may or may not be mindkilled but I'm certainly confused. The only mention I made of hormone therapy was to suggest that in the special context of prisoners wanting to move to a different prison on account of gender transition, being on hormone therapy might be a useful criterion for being demonstrably serious. (Not for being actually male/female. The point is that it is evidence of the sincerity of the prisoner's claim, which we need because in this situation insincere claims might otherwise be a problem.)
So far as I can see,
the debate whether or not an XY transsexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male
simply hasn't come up in this discussion, or at least not the bit of it you and I have been engaging in. Accordingly, I have no idea how anything I've written can suggest that I'm failing to distinguish that debate from any other debate. I also don't think the question was ever quite
whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.
although obvious that isn't a mile from what Fluttershy was saying.
So it looks to me as if there's a failure of communication here. Let me attempt to say clearly and explicitly what I think the issues are. My apologies for the length of what follows.
that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.
Well, you're entitled to your impression. I confess I'm unsure how you got it. In particular, I don't see that you made any such detailed arguments; in fact, the principal point of my original comment was that you failed to distinguish between "what should we do in general?" and "what should we do for the more difficult and dangerous case of imprisoned criminals?".
Wow, this discussion really took off! I mainly replied to VoiceOfRa's comment in order to encourage people to be nice to trans people in general, rather than to advocate any highly specific and well-thought-out position.
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.