I think that if someone is generally presenting as female we should let them use women's bathrooms if they want to. The obvious objections to this seem to be (1) ewww (which I suggest is not an argument)
Let me reformulate this as an argument :-D
Imagine a gym, or an athletic club. A pre-op transsexual presenting as a female shows up and you direct him/her to the women's locker room and showers. Soon after that a group of very irate (biological, conventional, mainstream, cis, heterosexual, not-quite-sexually-liberated) women show up and demand to know what someone with a dick is doing in their showers staring at their tits. Your response?
"I understand that you find it upsetting, but our policy here is that trans people get to use the changing rooms corresponding to the gender they identify with. If Ms X was staring at your breasts, that was well out of order regardless of gender and I will be happy to speak to her about it and make it clear that that behaviour is unacceptable. If you are troubled by Ms X's genitals, then I can only suggest that you try to ignore them."
Maybe some of them leave and never come back, or set the lawyers on me. No one ever said that doing the right thi...
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.