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.
So when I said that "ewww" isn't an argument I was taking it to mean "I find contemplating X unpleasant" rather than "if X happens, people Y who experience it will find it unpleasant". The former is a much much weaker argument than the latter.
(I should, of course, have considered the latter as well, and I'm not sure why I didn't. If women at a gym find it unpleasant when someone who identifies as female but has male-looking anatomy uses their changing room -- which they well might -- that is a bad thing, and that fact does constitute an argument for not allowing that. I happen to think that the arguments the other way are stronger, but as I said before I think both sides are defensible.)
In the case we're discussing here, the additional right comes with a perfectly matched additional responsibility. If access to a gym's changing rooms goes by expressed gender identity rather than anatomy, then identifying as female lets you into the women's rooms at exactly the same time as it bars you from the men's.
(One might argue that in fact someone with female identity but male anatomy should be allowed to use either to reduce the likelihood of their getting assaulted, or something. Members of unusually vulnerable groups sometimes get additional rights even if membership of the group is self-selected, and that's not obviously unreasonable. The additional rights are compensating for additional risks rather than additional responsibilities they people in question have taken on.)
Nice steelmanning of my position. No, wait, not steelmanning. The other thing.
But I'm a bit confused now about what your position is, because I think you've now said the following things:
and I'm not sure how to fill in that [...] at the end. "... because the (other) women may feel uncomfortable"? (But you just said that the fact that some people will feel uncomfortable shouldn't count for much in designing gym changing rooms.) "... because the (other) women may be at danger of assault"? (But you just said that we shouldn't worry about assaults in gym changing rooms.)
A nitpick: it is not male-looking anatomy, it is male anatomy.
Which responsibility? If I am of whatever gender I say I am, I can change genders at will. I am not "barred" from the other changing room any more than picking one door to walk through "bars" me from the other door.
That didn't involve transmuting your position into either steel or straw. That was just me amusing myself :-) I did not mean to imply anything about your views on widespread ... (read more)